🧠 Mac Mini for Local AI? Thought About It…

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people flexing their Mac Mini stacks for local AI/LLM workloads. Seemed cool, minimal, power-efficient. So I thought:

“Why not grab a second-hand Mac Mini and connect it to my homelab? Just for local AI stuff?”

Well… turns out there’s a catch. Pasted image 20250709182344.png

🚧 The Problem with Cheap Mac Minis

Most second-hand Mac Minis come with 8GB or 16GB of Unified Memory, and yeah, macOS can allocate up to 75% of that to GPU compute. But if you’re trying to run models like: