It’s not so clear after 5 years that you’ll come out ahead. You’ll have spent $20k. The apple computer owner will probably be running local models that are better than today’s frontier on the same hardware.
Idk where you live, but where I am running the M5 Ultra Mac Studio at max rated power 24/7 for a month costs C$42.
The considerations against Apple hardware are 1) hardware advancements 2) early access to the best models. But it’s really not that clear.
(The other guy who thought hosted models on openrouter are cheap has spent $100k in 5 years.)
Open weight models have been getting better/smaller every year.
Also, from what I can tell, MLX inference is not as well optimized as CUDA, and the M5 Ultra has additional kinds of AI compute which is unavailable on other M models. With the massive 1.2 TB/s 512GB Mac studios coming out, I think MLX will get a lot more attention.
In short: Todays models should run faster next year, and next year's models should also be more efficient.
Idk where you live, but where I am running the M5 Ultra Mac Studio at max rated power 24/7 for a month costs C$42.
The considerations against Apple hardware are 1) hardware advancements 2) early access to the best models. But it’s really not that clear.
(The other guy who thought hosted models on openrouter are cheap has spent $100k in 5 years.)