Everybody Wants to Make Their Own Mac mini Now, and It's Obvious Why

Just like the M6 Mac mini set to launch Sept. 22, the next generation of small-scale computers isn’t promising to be mere pint-sized PCs for your desk; they want to convince you they’re built to run all that ultra-hyped agentic AI locally.

For instance, Asus calls its newly revealed Ascent QN10 box the “world’s first” mini PC built for agentic AI. That kind of puffery seems like an incredible misnomer, considering just how many of this same kind of device have come over the last two years. Gizmodo just reviewed a Geekom A9 Max sporting a lower-end 12-core AMD chip inside. However, Asus wants to make this claim thanks to its 18-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite chip inside. It’s a 2025 CPU boasting a larger, 80 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) NPU for faster background AI tasks.