[antirez]

Mmmm, nope if you do the smart thing. MacBook M5 max 128gb is a premium laptop at 6k, but with it you can do many things and is your good main driver for the day. Then, it can also run DeepSeek V4 flash and perform non trivial tasks locally, without censorship or limitations, even without an internet connection and on very privacy sensitive data. That's a good deal. If you buy 25k for a dual Mac Studio 512gb to abandon OpenAI and company you are going to be disappointed by both performance and cost.

[datadrivenangel]

The smart thing is to get a ~48gb MacBook and use it as your daily driver, and then budget ~$800/year for AI subscriptions or tokens and you'll end up at the same price.

I say, as the author of the blog post, writing this on a MacBook M5 max 128gb..

[antirez]

I agree with you, practically. But there is another angle of the story: for instance models are starting to be useless to do security stuff, since they are every day more censored. Also prices skyrocketed in the latest months, what will happen later? A few months ago I was shocked people resisted to spend 20$/month to get basically free frontier models, and I warned we were headed to house monthly rent figures in the future as AI becomes more and more required to do work. So indeed what you say is absolutely true now (but $800/year is not accurate: you need 20x accounts to do real work in my experience, so $200 * 12 = 2400$/year). But if you have a 128GB MacBook, that no longer looks so costly compared to 2400$/year of frontier models, you can experience uncensored LLMs, a quick thing that always works to do low-value work like TLDR this blog post for me, or what's wrong in this function? Or could you explain me this API? And for this kind of work, DeepSeek v4 Flash looks basically frontier. So if you look at things in perspective, they could have a different shape.

[throwa356262]

"starting to be useless to do security stuff, since they are every day more censored"

I have not observed this at all, If anything the big 3 are getting both better and more helpful in this area. And if you pass the security checks Antropic will give you Limited access to Mythos.

[kamranjon]

Yea my m4 max with 128gb has ended up making a lot of sense for me. I do video editing, I train ml models, I run large open AI models, I do 3d modeling, rendering and cad work. I never do all of this 100% of the time, I’ll setup a ml training to run over night and check results in the morning, during work I’ll set it up as a server and run local models, on my own time I’ll edit video and work on 3d modeling. It’s an incredibly versatile machine - and all of this is done while keeping your data on your device and giving you full control over your workflows.

[throwa356262]

Don't tell the HN crowd, but you can run some of these models on a $200 rpi5 or a $500 AMD mini PCs.

Another open secret is that that certain companies give you tens of thousands of tokens freely, with pretty respectable models such as Gemini 3.1 and GLM 4.6.