Apple's new desktop computers are designed specifically for local AI development
The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple's lineup of desktops, but lately, they've had something in common: They're popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip. Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple's M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful c
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Apple announced new desktop computers with chips designed for running artificial intelligence models locally on users' machines rather than relying on cloud services. The new M6 and M5 Ultra chips offer significantly increased memory capacity and bandwidth, with the M5 Ultra supporting up to 512GB of unified memory compared to the M6's 32GB limit. Developers have increasingly been connecting multiple Mac computers together to run large language models locally because cloud-based AI services are expensive, while open-source models can run on local hardware with lower operating costs. These refreshes represent Apple's shift toward optimizing its desktop computers for this emerging use case, as local AI inference became popular after a software update enabled faster communication between connected machines.
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