[taylorhou]

Annecdotal here but I've been buying studios with as much ram as possible. I probably got in one of the last orders for the m3 ultra 512gb ram officially from apple late February right before they took that config down. I know this because the very next day I went back to order more and couldn't.

There's a ton of spam on ebay currently with configs of the 512gb ram variant going for sub $4k. Those are all scams/spam. You can tell instantly because the seller's account is/was created this month 2026.

The $20k+ listings aren't selling but what's interesting is technically, $20k for 512gb ram is still less than $40/gb ram on a single device. Compare that to a Nvidia spark with 128gb ram selling at $4k+ or if you're lucky, you snagged one for ~$3500. That's $31.25/gb

The retail on the 512gb was $9500 and after tax if you don't ship to a sales tax free state makes it only $20/gb ram.

I'm curious what price apple's newest studio variant will be priced at per gb ram but I recently bought a "refurb" from a reputable seller I've purchased many laptops from in the past at $13,750 which still put the 512gb at a $27/gb ram price point.

I'm bullish on local models especially due to gemma4. Good luck out there!

[embedding-shape]

> but I've been buying studios with as much ram as possible

Why though? Are you managing a fleet of headless Mac Studios? You mention LLMs, but today's Mac hardware really isn't great as soon as you use bit larger contexts, so I'm guessing it's not that either?

[taylorhou]

We combo frontier coding models with last frontier for more admin stuff.

[embedding-shape]

But with macOS hardware? What kind of calculations did you do that shows that this makes sense? 6-7 months ago I looked into the same, getting a bunch of Apple hardware to do local LLM inference (for a client), but the bad performance + high pricing just makes it completely infeasible compared to nvidia hardware.

Now I'm really curious how you got that to make sense in reality.

[taylorhou]

250+ employees on the lowest paid subscriptions of claude or openai is $5k/month. their usage of AI is chatbot most of the time which local models/inference can easily handle. so just being able to cancel those subscriptions with local hardware makes my break even on a single $10k mac studio 2 months and honestly the mac studio for their use is overkill.