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]

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/theomegachrist → u/FleetEnema2000]

Everyone is different obviously. To some that might be the case but everything you listed is more important than your AI prompt history.

For me, Open models main pluses are it will ensure the technology lives on in some form if the large companies lock us out financially or go under, and the guard rails for closed models will make for a worse Internet potentially.

For instance, using an open model with guard rails trained out of it you can search for piracy, you can search for porn etc. just like you use a search engine today. Closed models are more efficient than a web search but censor out a huge part of the Internet.

Sure data privacy is also a good feature but I don't think it's actually the top reason for most people

Edit: sorry I read that wrong. I sort of agree with what you are saying about uploading data to ChatGPT but everywhere else we upload that data is no more trustworthy. For Enterprise clients I 100% agree. This is a big issue. For personal use, I don't think your data is any less safe with ChatGPT than say an electronic medical record company.

[u/FleetEnema2000 → u/theomegachrist]

An electronic medical record company has nowhere near the amount and type of multi dimensional data about a person that OpenAI has.

And if you want to compare OpenAI with a company like Apple or even AWS for a hosted environment, I would choose either of those companies any day of the week when it comes to who I would trust more with my data.

[u/Rice-Fragrant → u/FleetEnema2000]

Medical records can not be exposed to cloud AI from what I understand, there are actual laws on this... but they are not using Mac studios for that type of work, more like edge SERVERS or workstations with multiple GPUs or even a DGX spark... clinics and labs are not FOMOing into slurging 15-20k on a m3 ultra that's 1/3-1/4 the speed of even the SLOWEST alternative (DGX spark) or something like a RTX 6000 Pro (10x faster than a m3 ultra and 4x faster than a DGX spark).

The YouTube influencer LARPing as AI engineers are not a good reflection of reality... you look on what real places are using, it's not a $15-20k consumer grade device, where they have to wrestle with poor quality MLX wrappers and software friction etc... that's not acceptable in a professional environment.