{"id":261184,"date":"2026-06-01T12:32:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T16:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/01\/the-mac-mini-was-a-great-cheap-apple-computer-until-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T12:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T16:55:09","slug":"the-mac-mini-was-a-great-cheap-apple-computer-until-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/01\/the-mac-mini-was-a-great-cheap-apple-computer-until-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mac Mini Was a Great, Cheap Apple Computer \u2014 Until AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mac Mini Was a Great, Cheap Apple Computer \u2014 Until AI<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/wirecutter\/reviews\/mac-mini-ai-shortage\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-01 12:32:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\"A<\/span><\/span>I was able to make a rudimentary task manager in just 30 minutes using local AI tools.\u00a0Dave Gershgorn\/NYT Wirecutter<\/span><\/p>\n

To see what all the fuss is about, I decided to vibe-code an AI project on a Mac mini. Vibe-coding is building software using AI without typing out code manually. I tested it out by creating a simple task manager for myself using our mini PC upgrade pick, a Mac mini with an M4 Pro processor and 48 GB of RAM. In the first test, I used local AI models on the Mac mini. Then I did the same thing using Claude Code, which relies on Anthropic\u2019s cloud models. Local AI models have the advantage of running entirely on your machine, so you don\u2019t have to pay continuing costs such as a monthly Claude subscription (which ranges from $20 to $100 depending on what you need it for). On the other hand, cloud models can be faster, more up-to-date, and equipped with a larger working memory, since they\u2019re running on ultra-fast data-center servers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vibe-coding is not necessarily as simple or straightforward as telling a chatbot to make an app for you (although it can be). First, I had to find a model. The model is the AI, and all the other software I would use interacts with this model in different ways. Companies such as Hugging Face and Ollama store and rank the latest models, so I looked on those sites for a recent model that was large enough to fill a good portion of my 48 GB of memory and had good benchmarks compared with ChatGPT and Claude in reasoning and coding. I settled on the Qwen 3.6 35B model built by Alibaba, which takes about 30\u00a0GB to 40\u00a0GB of RAM when running and is competitive with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic\u2019s flagship AI models.<\/p>\n

Then, I installed and ran Ollama, an application to run the model, and Visual Studio Code paired with an extension called Continue to add the LLM\u2019s code to the document. I was done with setup and ready to prompt.<\/p>\n

\"Coding<\/span><\/span>I wrote prompts and saw the code generated inside Visual Studio Code, which has extensions to connect…
\n
Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mac Mini Was a Great, Cheap Apple Computer \u2014 Until AI https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/wirecutter\/reviews\/mac-mini-ai-shortage\/ Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":261185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/01\/wirecutter\/NYK-MAC-MINI-AI-SHORTAGE-TOP\/NYK-MAC-MINI-AI-SHORTAGE-TOP-threeByTwoLargeAt2X.jpg?auto=webp&quality=75&crop=1.91:1&width=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-261184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-macintosh","tag-mac-mini"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261186,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261184\/revisions\/261186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}