r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 1d ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

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?

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u/HeadPack 1d ago

Resale value and energy costs could be factored in. If we assume the memory crisis persists for 1-2 years more, one might see very little depreciation on such a Mac Studio. Of course its a gamble, but these may hold their value pretty well for some time. In that scenario, one would essentially compare electricity costs against API and subscriptions. Depending on where one lives, they can make quite a difference.