Ran a headless Mac Mini for my AI agent for about a month now. The hardware story changes completely when you stop thinking of it as a computer and start thinking of it as infrastructure.

The transition was rougher than expected though. Screen capture and UI automation break immediately without a virtual display. Tailscale for remote access, passwordless sudo, sleep disabled. Once those are in place it runs like a server but with native macOS apps.

The cost argument is real too. VPS at equivalent specs runs $150+/month. Mac Mini pays for itself in under a year. What I didn't expect: the M4 handles 7B parameter models locally without breaking a sweat. Runs inference, cron jobs, and browser automation simultaneously.