MacStories: M6 and M5 Ultra offer huge potential for local AI on macOS
Dimillian · x · 2026-08-25
Federico Viticci of MacStories breaks down what the new M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio mean for local AI. He has spent a year with a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio running local agents via MLX: DeepSeek-V4-Flash-powered agents continuously scan his Notion workspace, categorizing and linking research material for his iOS 27 review.
Key points:
- M6: built on 2nm with a dual Neural Engine system — a meaningful upgrade for on-device inference despite not being the flagship
- M5 Ultra: exclusive to Mac Studio, with the memory bandwidth and capacity for large local models
- His MLX experiments show Apple silicon local agent workflows are already practical
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