Does one really need to _buy_ a completely new desktop hardware (ie. mac mini) to _run_ a simple request/response program?

Excluding the fact that you can run LLMs via ollama or similar directly on the device, but that will not have a very good token/s speed as far as I can guess...

You don’t, but for those who would like the agent to interact with Apple provided services like reminders and iMessage it works for that.

I’m pretty sure people are using them for local inference. Token rates can be acceptable if you max out the specs. If it was just the harness, they’d use a $20 raspberry pi instead.