Asus, Lenovo and Acer Unveil AI Mini PCs From $1,350 to Challenge Apple’s $900 Mac mini
Updated
Updated · Gizmodo · Sep 17
Asus, Lenovo and Acer Unveil AI Mini PCs From $1,350 to Challenge Apple’s $900 Mac mini
3 articles · Updated · Gizmodo · Sep 17
Summary
$1,350 Asus Ascent QN10 and $3,700 Lenovo ThinkCentre X Ultra headline a new wave of mini PCs pitched for running agentic AI locally, with Acer’s RTX Spark also on the way.
Asus is leaning on Qualcomm’s 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite and an 80 TOPS NPU, while Lenovo offers an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 with up to 128GB of unified memory.
The push targets Apple’s Mac mini, whose M6 version launches Sept. 22 starting at $900 and promises up to 5x better AI processing than the prior model.
Cost remains the main constraint: higher-end Apple configurations reach $1,700, and even then a single mini PC may still struggle with larger on-device models without clustering multiple systems.