I built a four-sensor Gemma 4 replacement on a Mac mini.
For about a week I had OpenAI’s research-preview Chronicle running on my MacBook. Every ten minutes it screenshotted my display, uploaded frames to OpenAI for analysis, and wrote Markdown summaries on my Mac. I was crawling that folder and ingesting the data in a Postgres table on my homelab.
It worked.
It also cost credits for every cycle of attention.
This weekend I replaced it with a single Gemma 4 E4B 4-bit MLX instance running on a $599 Mac mini, summarizing four independent sensor streams locally with zero outbound LLM calls and effectively zero marginal inference cost.
