The entry ticket was a $4,800 DGX Spark or an Ubuntu machine with an Nvidia RTX card. A Windows PC with a supported NVIDIA RTX GPU and 24GB of VRAM or higher now runs Portable Computer on local models. Perplexity also switched on local MCPs and scheduled tasks, so the agent can fire jobs on your own machine on a timer.
Locally you get PPLX 27B, Perplexity's post-trained take on Qwen 3.8 27B, while Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning stays marked "Coming Soon". Oddly, stock Qwen 3.8 27B isn't offered on Windows at all, though it was one of the two picks when Portable Computer launched on DGX Spark.