I read a Tom’s Hardware piece about Mac minis getting marked up to absurd numbers on eBay because AI hobbyists are scrambling for cheap unified-memory machines. Listings well above MSRP. Sellers cleaning up. And Apple reportedly cannot keep them in stock at retail because everyone wants a small box that can run a 70B model quietly in the corner of an office.

I get the appeal. Local AI feels like the obvious move once you have seen what your data does in the cloud, sent off, logged somewhere, used to train who knows what. So people want something they can plug a power cable into and walk away from.

But there is a strange thing nobody mentions in the Mac mini gold rush. You already own a piece of local AI hardware. You’re sitting at it. And it’s the laptop running this tab.

The eBay frenzy is about compute, not Apple

And the reason Mac minis are showing up on eBay at $1,400 is not that people love Apple’s industrial design. It’s that an M4 Pro with 64GB of unified memory is among the cheapest ways to run a serious model on your own desk without paying OpenAI per token, which until last year meant either a $5K GPU rig or hourly cloud rentals.

So buying a Mac mini for AI is a bet that local execution matters enough to spend $1,400 on a small dedicated box.

Fine. That’s a real bet. And privacy matters. So does cost-per-token at scale. But I get why people want it.

I’m just pointing out that there’s a weaker but much more accessible version of “local AI” that ships in every web browser on every machine ever sold, and almost nobody talks about it that way.

Your tab is hardware you already own

Browsers are weird in 2026. They’re full virtual machines. They hold your sessions, your cookies, your logged-in Gmail and Notion and Linear. They render pixels. They can read the DOM. And they can click things.

A browser agent runs inside that environment. It uses the page you’re already on, the account you’re already logged into, the data already loaded in memory. And nothing leaves your machine except the LLM call itself, which you control because you bring your own key.

That last bit doesn’t get said enough. The agent isn’t local in the sense that the model weights sit on your laptop. It’s local in the sense that the browser context (the tabs, the cookies, the rendered HTML, the inputs) never leaves your computer, and it only ships the slice the model actually needs to reason about, only to the LLM provider you picked. If you’ve already worked through the local browser vs cloud browser distinction, this is familiar terrain.

So one shape of “local AI” is a $1,400 Mac mini buying you 70B-parameter inference at home. The other shape is a Chrome extension that pipes frontier-model intelligence into the browser context already running on the laptop you already own. Both real. Different shapes.

Dassi is the second shape. It’s the side panel in your Chrome window, BYOK, free. It can read whatever tab you point it at. And your data is in your browser already; it does not need to go anywhere new.

A confession

I do want a Mac mini.

What pure-local actually costs you

Running a 70B model at home means you don’t have GPT-5.2 or Claude Opus 4.7 available. You have whatever fits in your unified memory at 4-bit quantization. That’s a real model with real capability. But on most browser tasks I’ve tried, the gap to a frontier model is still wide enough to matter. And frontier models keep improving in ways that quantized 70Bs don’t, because the hard work of training a new generation isn’t something a hobbyist community can replicate each quarter.

Browser agents sidestep that whole question. You bring whichever model you trust this month and swap it out next month if something better ships. The hardware (your laptop) is fixed. The intelligence is rented. And the browser context, local, yours, never moves.

The eBay listing nobody is putting up

If you already paid for a laptop, and you already pay for a ChatGPT or Claude subscription, you’ve already bought both pieces. There is nothing to wait for. No shortage. And nobody’s hoarding inventory in a Newark warehouse.

The Mac mini frenzy is an interesting market signal. People want local. People want private. People are willing to pay markup for it. Hell, there’s a working second-hand economy forming around “the AI box.”

But don’t forget the AI box already open in front of you.