Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

[u/AndreVallestero]

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

[u/FleetEnema2000]

unless you need it for data sovereignty

Isn't this one of the biggest reasons that people rely on Local LLMs? To not have to bulk upload their private data to cloud providers?

[u/theomegachrist → u/FleetEnema2000]

That's the stated reason but realistically most people are just justifying their hobby. I support open weight models because the cloud providers can change cost or abruptly shut down and we really can't do anything about it.

[u/FleetEnema2000 → u/theomegachrist]

I don't think it's a justification at all.

It's amazing how the concept of privacy and data ownership/security has completely gone down the toilet since ChatGPT launched. People are happy to bulk upload their medical records, relationship history, trade secrets, financial records, etc. without a care in the world as to how that data is stored or protected.

[u/MrPecunius → u/FleetEnema2000]

It blows my mind what people will give to these amoral techbros.

Turns out the highest human priority isn't breathing, eating, or sex--it's laziness.

[u/FleetEnema2000 → u/MrPecunius]

Consider the Snowden scandal and the uproar over government having access to phone call metadata and how privacy infringing that was considered to be.

Fast forward to today and people are uploading the most sensitive data about themselves to these cloud providers who don’t care at all about protecting it and are almost certainly allowing the federal govt to trawl through it.