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.

The AI angle is particularly important. Apple said the M6 Neural Engine can deliver up to twice the peak compute of previous generations, while the chip's GPU provides nearly 30% more peak AI compute than M5 and more than eight times that of the original M1.

Mac Studio now tops out at 96GB of RAM. Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac Apple is perceived as a laggard in the AI race — despite that, Apple has developed the single best computer for AI research. The new Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra chip, which supports up ...

The Mac Studio has reportedly caught on among developers as a good platform to use for working with large artificial intelligence models.