Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio have become the machines of choice for running AI agents, according to Doug Brooks, Apple’s senior product manager for Apple silicon.
Brooks made the claim while discussing Apple’s chip strategy in a recently published interview with The deep view conducted just before WWDC 2026 in June.
Brooks says the company has seen “incredible demand” for both desktop Macs. When it comes to agentic workloads, “people often want a system that is under their control, isolated from their main machine and capable of running 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Brooks said.
“A Mac mini is a great system for this,” he added.
Many AI tools are also intended for the Mac first or only, which Brooks said has helped solidify the Mac’s position among developers, including those in frontier AI labs where Macs are considered common.
The Apple executive also views agentic AI as an overall chip problem rather than a GPU problem. “It’s no longer just about the GPU taking care of an LLM,” he said. “It’s the entire chip that contributes to different parts of the task, the tool calls and the things that happen around those workflows. It really highlights the strengths of Apple silicon.”
Brooks links Apple’s strong position in modern AI to chip decisions made long before the arrival of LLMs like ChatGPT. He points to the Neural Engine, designed for energy-efficient matrix calculations, as well as the lesser-known neural accelerators inside the processor that handle time-sensitive tasks like speech.
Apple recently added neural accelerators to the GPU, which has expanded AI performance across the board, from iPhone-class components to the Mac’s larger silicon. Brooks relates these advances to Apple’s design method, where a chip is built for a specific machine, and the hardware and software are developed in tandem.
He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud — a shift driven by privacy, security, and the increasing cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide what runs on the device and what is sent to the cloud.
He also highlighted what he calls “transparent AI” on iPhone and iPad, referring to features scattered throughout the operating system and third-party apps that operate silently without presenting themselves as AI.
Some of the examples he cited include Draw Things, an image generator that works on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and SwingVision, which analyzes tennis and pickleball play in real time using the iPhone’s cameras.
“The current speed of AI development is just crazy,” Brooks said. “I can’t imagine where we will be in a year, in three months, or even in a month,” he added.
You can read the full interview at The deep view website.
