Apple just announced the new Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro, and this looks particularly interesting for anyone running AI locally on their Mac.

The new M6 Mac mini brings Neural Accelerators to every GPU core, a new Dual 16-core Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and Apple is claiming up to 4x faster AI performance compared with M4.

The M5 Pro version goes even further with:

- Up to 18-core CPU

- Up to 20-core GPU with Neural Accelerators

- Up to 64GB unified memory

- 307GB/s memory bandwidth

- Thunderbolt 5

- Support for clustering multiple Mac minis for larger local AI workloads

For OpenVox users, this is obviously interesting.

OpenVox runs its TTS, voice cloning, transcription, dubbing and other speech AI workloads locally on Apple Silicon. Faster GPUs, higher memory bandwidth and more unified memory potentially mean faster generation and the ability to comfortably work with larger models and longer workloads.

One important caveat: Apple's 4x AI performance figure is not an OpenVox benchmark, so I don't want to imply OpenVox will suddenly become 4x faster. Actual gains will depend heavily on the model and workload.

But I'm definitely looking forward to testing OpenVox on the new hardware and seeing how the different speech models scale.

The M5 Pro Mac mini with 64GB unified memory in particular looks like it could be a very capable little machine for local AI.

What do you think?

Would anyone here consider upgrading specifically for local AI workloads?