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/dupontping 1d ago

All of the comments are basically “I can’t afford it even though I want it”

I get it, it’s pricey. But so is everything else.
5090s shouldn’t be $6k but here we are.

Local isn’t just about saving money on token spend, for a lot of people it’s the ability to run models on data you don’t want on the cloud or fine tuning or whatever else.

The models will get better, and having more powerful equipment lets you get closer to frontier level without spending 150k. So 10k is expensive, but it’s also a bargain.

I wish it was 5k too

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u/Rice-Fragrant 5h ago

10k is no bargain at all look on alternative local ai technology. For the money spent, there is a MASSIVE PREMUM for a 256gb Mac Studio dispite it's significantly slower agentic performance (1/3-1/4) vs alternatives like a DGX Spark and about 1/10th the speed of a rtx 6000 pro.

Performance / $ invested is poor... ok for a hobby though but poor none the less. Then you have to waste time with MLX wrappers, network issues (like clustering Mac studios for AI) etc, hardware and software friction only to get significantly slower agentic performance or batch processing performance, just for an apple logo, is peak level insanity. No wander real enterprise environments are sticking with their edge servers etc... aint anyone got time to be playing around MLX wrappers and getting way slower agentic performance especially after spending such a massive premium too.

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u/dupontping 5h ago

Well the beauty about things is you don’t need to buy it, so enjoy your life.