Mac Mini, Strix Halo duel for local AI dominance

The local LLM hardware market has matured into a two-horse race where unified memory capacity is the only metric that truly matters.

• –Mac Mini M5 Pro is the efficiency leader, offering the best performance-per-watt and seamless MLX/Ollama integration for prosumers who value silence and stability.
• –AMD’s Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo) is the market disruptor, providing up to 128GB of unified memory in portable form factors, effectively outclassing the Mac Mini’s memory ceiling.
• –Thunderbolt 5 has revolutionized local inference by allowing low-latency clustering of multiple small units, making it possible to run 400B+ models on a desktop cluster of minis.
• –For website design and coding, the M5 Pro’s superior NPU and GPU prefill speeds provide a snappier experience for RAG-based coding assistants compared to the first-gen AI laptops.