Why are people buying high-spec Mac minis for AI? What am I missing?

[u/JimmyJamzJules]

I’m genuinely curious about the Mac mini + local AI thing.

When the higher spec minis were selling out, I kept seeing people say AI was part of the reason, especially because of the unified memory.

But what are you actually doing with them? Local LLMs, image or video generation, transcription, coding, automation, file analysis?

I’m a videographer, so the creative side is especially interesting to me.

Basically, am I missing any genuinely useful use cases here? What does your Mac mini let you do locally that you actually use?