1. Choose your hardware

Minimum

Any Apple silicon Mac mini, 16 GB

Sweet spot

24–32 GB, 512 GB–1 TB

Must-haves

Ethernet, small UPS

Most AI assistants and coding agents — Cursor, Claude, Claude Code, a Cursor self-hosted worker — do their thinking in the cloud. The Mac mini runs the tools they call: your editor, terminals, test suites, package installs, browsers and build systems. Size the machine for that work, not for the model, unless you also want to run models locally.

Pick a model

Any Apple silicon Mac mini (M1 or later) works. If you’re buying new, get the current generation; if you have an older M1 or M2 mini in a drawer, it makes an excellent first server.

You want to…	Memory	Storage
Run cloud-based assistants and one or two coding agents	16 GB	512 GB
Run several agents in parallel, Docker, browsers, iOS builds	24–32 GB	1 TB
Also run local models (7–14B comfortably, larger quantised)	32–64 GB (Pro chip)	1–2 TB

You can’t upgrade later

Memory is part of the chip on every Apple silicon Mac and cannot be added after purchase. The internal SSD is not user-replaceable either. When in doubt, buy one step up on memory and add storage externally.

Why memory matters more than CPU: every agent session can spawn language servers, a dev server, a test runner and a headless browser. Running out of memory makes macOS swap to the SSD, which is what makes an otherwise idle server feel sluggish.

Accessories that matter

Wired Ethernet. More reliable than Wi-Fi for a machine you can’t see. It also matters for unattended restarts: on macOS 26 you can unlock FileVault over SSH after a reboot, and that pre-login network is most dependable over Ethernet.

A small UPS (uninterruptible power supply). A basic line-interactive UPS with a USB port rides through short outages and brown-outs. Connect its USB cable to the Mac and macOS shows UPS options under System Settings → Energy so it can shut down cleanly before the battery runs out.

External SSD (optional). A USB-C or Thunderbolt NVMe drive is a cheap way to add space for Time Machine, Docker images or model files.

HDMI “dummy” plug (optional). The Mac mini runs happily with no display attached, and Screen Sharing works headless. Some people add a dummy plug to get a specific resolution when screen sharing, or because a GPU-dependent app misbehaves without a display. Only buy one if you hit that problem.

Where to put it

• Somewhere with airflow — not a closed drawer or a cabinet with no ventilation.
• Near your router, so it can use Ethernet.
• Plugged into the UPS, with the UPS’s USB cable connected to the Mac.
• Physically secure: anyone who can touch the machine can unplug it, and if you choose to turn FileVault off, can read the disk.

Keyboard and screen for setup

You’ll need a keyboard, mouse (or trackpad) and display for the first hour — to get through Setup Assistant and turn on remote access. After that, it can live headless.