Mac Mini
The always-on on-ramp: a silent, low-power desktop you can leave serving 24/7. Apple Silicon's unified memory lets a $600–2000 box hold models that would otherwise need a discrete GPU with the same VRAM — the deciding advantage for this tier.
MacBook Pro
The portable AI workstation: an M3 Max / M4 Max with 64–128GB of unified memory is the highest-memory option in this tier, and doubles as your dev machine. Same Apple Silicon serving story as the Mac Mini, with a bigger ceiling.
RTX laptop
An AI-optimized Windows/Linux laptop with a discrete NVIDIA GPU (RTX 4080/4090 Laptop, 12–16GB VRAM). Less memory than an Apple Silicon machine, but CUDA gives it the fastest prompt-processing in this tier — the right pick when executor latency matters more than model size.
Desktop tower
A single-GPU desktop (one RTX 4090 or 5090, 24–32GB VRAM) is the top of this tier — enough VRAM and CUDA throughput to brush up against executor-heavy, while staying always-on and mains-powered like a Mac Mini but faster.