It's plausible but is the Apple Tax for a 1TB memory machine on top of current memory prices really worth it? I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop with 16GB VRAM back in 2023, it's great but DoA for even quantized LLMs. I can run SLMs and fine tune it but that's it.
We need one of those specialized inference chip startups to succeed and a PC manufacturer willing to bet on them against Nvidia for the local AI to find mass market appeal.
I recently bought a Mac mini M4 16 GB - mostly to run Immich. I assumed I needed a Linux box. After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax.
>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax."
Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.
That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.
That's how much many developers currently spend on tokens - every day. Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.
>Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.
Current high-end Mac Studio with 32-core M3 Ultra chip and 96 GB of memory is $6800, 96GB is not enough to run GLM 5.2 without extreme quantization or stacking HW; but for the sake of discussion let's run quantized version on a single high end Mac Studio.
GLM 5.2 Max plan costs $ 112/m, so it would take ~60 months to recover the costs assuming the machine was bought just for AI. By then the current AI landscape would have changed drastically.
I use local AI on both Linux and Mac every single day, there's freedom, privacy and peace of mind in running the model locally. But I feel cost/value of local AI is overblown.
I didn't have a single Apple device in my house until a month ago when I bought a Neo. The last Apple devices I had before that were an iPod Nano and a PowerMac G5 many many years ago.
Apple has pretty good competition in every segment with the exception of maybe the iPad, but I'm not a tablet user.
Some folks like to have a computing environment free of proprietary influences and extremely strong vendor lock-in. I cannot claim to posses any apple devices.
I wasn't thinking of Asahi. Just pointing out that you can run all the standard unix/open source tools and apps on Mac OS (vi, git, qgis, blender, vsc, python, node, etc). With the advantage of higher quality hardware and generally less fiddling.
But if you don't like it, switch. I don't see vendor lock-in.
there a many people who don't own Apple. Why are you so surprised? I certainly don't and never will. What's it got that I can't get on a standard PC + Linux?
We need one of those specialized inference chip startups to succeed and a PC manufacturer willing to bet on them against Nvidia for the local AI to find mass market appeal.