3 ms·

"Just get a 64GB Mac with 1TB of storage!" LOL - some of us have a budget

by _doctor_love 4mo ago

tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
AI and budgets don't mix well at the moment
techscruggs 4mo ago
He is using a 2022 M2, which you can get that for about $2k used. That is beyond reasonable.
- psychoslave 4mo ago
  Global Affordability Estimate: Top 10% of global earners (~800M people) can afford a $2,000 device without major financial strain. Top 25% (~2B people) could afford it with some budget adjustments. Bottom 50% (~4B people) would find it prohibitively expensive. So for a SV top income, maybe that might look more like the weekly pet brushing budget, but for most people out there this is not that much of a no-brainer.
  - richwater 4mo ago
    Yes, because the bottom 50%, mostly impoverished or near impoverished folks were spending money on Claude Code subscriptions instead /s
    - ric2b 4mo ago
      2K is 10 years of a Claude Pro subscription, which also gives you better models...
  - disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
    The maths changes if you're working for yourself. Because I live in Europe, I've ended up working as a contractor due to the lack of a legal entity in my country. While that mostly sucked for a bunch of reasons, I was able to get a 64Gb Mac M2 a few years back with approximately a 52% discount, which was kinda nice.
    - weego 4mo ago
      If you're working for yourself paying monthly is exactly the same as amortising an asset. Personally I'd rather my business just pay $100 a month than have to deal with additional hardware and software maintenance while using a depreciating asset that is break-even after 3-5 years depending on the spec.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    Bottom 50% aren't paying for Claude either, probably also don't own PCs or write code
- Shekelphile 4mo ago
  She
themythfable 4mo ago
Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average. Besides those with effectively unlimited budgets for their personal compute, local models are still a long ways off. Though, that shouldn't be conflated with the value of open-source models, which can be used by cloud providers to significantly reduce cost of intelligence.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average. There are segments, everything from "Average person in world" to "Average creative professional using computers for work" and more on HN, with a wide range of costs for the hardware. HN probably skews towards the latter rather than the former, probably sitting with enterprise hardware next to them basically for fun, hard to make wider conclusions from what people here have or not.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  If we define "typical" as the median HN budget, it's probably about the same as yours. Maybe the answer would have been different 10 or 20 years ago, but the era of truly needing a big budget PC has been over for a while. It's just for gaming and AI now. Maybe not even gaming as much anymore. Consider the perspective of someone who has a practically unlimited budget for PCs, doesn't game much anymore, and doesn't need AI to do their job. It's just part of getting older, and there are plenty of people in their late 30s and older on here.
p-e-w 4mo ago
No need. You can run the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 MoE models with as little as 12 GB of VRAM at 30-40 tps (Q4/Q5), and they both blow GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 out of the water.
swatcoder 4mo ago
Sure, but it's also not really out of scale with the cost of a shop tool in other trades. If you're a professional that's confident in a positive return on the investment (optimal or not), or just a hobbyist with the luxury budget for a "shop" that cost is well within norms. That's not everybody, of course, but it's not some inconceivable fantasy. A lot of people in the tech community here on HN, specifically, end up with pretty high discretionary budgets that they pour into stuff like this.
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  But you can get that return from a paid service too, in fact it'll be better. So just comparing costs, what's the annualized ROI on the Mac Studio assuming it means you avoid paying $240/y for Claude? Cause I can always set aside the Mac's price in some investments and pay for Claude out of that.
  - swatcoder 4mo ago
    Same with many and their shop tools in other trades. Most hobbyists and many professionals could end up far ahead financially by leveraging makerspaces, tool rentals, and co-op shops or even by hiring out a professional to prep certain intermediates for them, but they get psychological value -- as well as flexibility, reliability, and resale opportunity -- from having their own well-outfitted shop. And they can afford that premium, so they do. At the scale of individuals and small shops, not everything that matters gets captured in financial models.
    - frollogaston 4mo ago
      Yeah but the local model doesn't have those advantages for the coding use cases, at least not yet. In theory you could post-train one on your codebase or something, but nobody cares to do that when any vanilla coding agent service can read and understand the whole thing better than a locally tuned free model. I was already being very generous towards the Mac in pretending it does the same thing as the paid service. Aside, physical tools tend to be financially advantageous to own if you're going to use them a lot. Even if the owner were targeting 0 profit, they'd have to charge more to factor in the cost of dealing with customers and increased risk of wear/damage by users who don't care as much.
amalcon 4mo ago
A Strix Halo with similar RAM is considerably cheaper. Still not cheap, mind, but performance is OK (not great) and it will run more or less the same models.
- AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
  At least for me, it's been pretty great, but I bought my system when it was $1800, now looks like the same system is $2700 and out of stock. I still haven't quite been able to run 120B parameter models under Windows, but for Qwen Coder 30B, it works pretty darn well for my at home needs.
  - amalcon 4mo ago
    Yeah, they have gone up a lot since I bought mine too. I did get Qwen3.5-122b running on all-GPU (on a 128GB machine) under a minimal Arch Linux setup (I do my GUI work on a much cheaper box). It worked, but Qwen3.6-35b is performing almost as well and a lot faster. Still cheaper than a new Mac. Maybe not cheaper than a used one.
    - AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
      I've certainly thought about just moving the box to Linux, but it took far to long personally to get everything running under AMD and it works 'well enough' that I don't want to make the switch. I tried playing with GAIA on it, felt a bit limited, and now have Hermes up and running, and that seems to work quite well. All the tools are changing so quickly, it's sometimes difficult to settle in on 'what's best', so I certainly can understand folks that just want to pay for a AI subscription and be done with it.
dofm 4mo ago
[dead]
anarticle 4mo ago
Pros buy their own tools. This is why working for yourself is better than working for a corpo, you get to choose your weapon.
- _doctor_love 4mo ago
  That's daft mate
  - anarticle 4mo ago
    Is it? When you're inside the fence you get some IT cast off from the last guy that was cleaned up and re-spywared from 2-3y ago (sometimes worse!). As a hired gun (data science/engineer), I have an m3 128gb 1tb all sliders to the right MacBook Pro that works great, no spyware, rocket fast, trains/runs small models. With Apple 0%, paid in a year. I generally can name my price so it pays for itself. If you're riding it every day, every little speed up counts. I don't wait on GitHub actions or external systems for my crunching. For that I have my local slurm cluster of mini PCs, 64 cpus and counting! I assure you there is a better world outside of the fence, I am unlikely to return.
    - _doctor_love 4mo ago
      I'm curious the last time you touched reality
      - anarticle 4mo ago
        Not really sure what you're getting at there, I was a hired gun for about a year, founded a company and am having a great time. Last time I was at a corporate gig, I got a 2+ year old base model MacBook Pro to do a data science. 16gb of ram is fun and all, but when you're using R you're going to have a bad time. During my hired gun period I worked with two organizations that used gitlab, and they're doing just fine. One place I had no problem using their cloud for bigger runs, the other had a permission system that was pissing me off so I solved my own problem and billed them enough it didn't matter anyhow. Like I said, having extra cpus for big R runs you don't have to ask anyone for has a value all its own. Happy computing!

"Just get a 64GB Mac with 1TB of storage!" LOL - some of us have a budget

tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago

AI and budgets don't mix well at the moment

techscruggs 4mo ago

He is using a 2022 M2, which you can get that for about $2k used. That is beyond reasonable.

psychoslave 4mo ago
Global Affordability Estimate: Top 10% of global earners (~800M people) can afford a $2,000 device without major financial strain. Top 25% (~2B people) could afford it with some budget adjustments. Bottom 50% (~4B people) would find it prohibitively expensive. So for a SV top income, maybe that might look more like the weekly pet brushing budget, but for most people out there this is not that much of a no-brainer.
- richwater 4mo ago
  Yes, because the bottom 50%, mostly impoverished or near impoverished folks were spending money on Claude Code subscriptions instead /s
  - ric2b 4mo ago
    2K is 10 years of a Claude Pro subscription, which also gives you better models...
- disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
  The maths changes if you're working for yourself. Because I live in Europe, I've ended up working as a contractor due to the lack of a legal entity in my country. While that mostly sucked for a bunch of reasons, I was able to get a 64Gb Mac M2 a few years back with approximately a 52% discount, which was kinda nice.
  - weego 4mo ago
    If you're working for yourself paying monthly is exactly the same as amortising an asset. Personally I'd rather my business just pay $100 a month than have to deal with additional hardware and software maintenance while using a depreciating asset that is break-even after 3-5 years depending on the spec.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  Bottom 50% aren't paying for Claude either, probably also don't own PCs or write code
Shekelphile 4mo ago
She

themythfable 4mo ago

Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average. Besides those with effectively unlimited budgets for their personal compute, local models are still a long ways off. Though, that shouldn't be conflated with the value of open-source models, which can be used by cloud providers to significantly reduce cost of intelligence.

embedding-shape 4mo ago
> Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average. There are segments, everything from "Average person in world" to "Average creative professional using computers for work" and more on HN, with a wide range of costs for the hardware. HN probably skews towards the latter rather than the former, probably sitting with enterprise hardware next to them basically for fun, hard to make wider conclusions from what people here have or not.
sublinear 4mo ago
If we define "typical" as the median HN budget, it's probably about the same as yours. Maybe the answer would have been different 10 or 20 years ago, but the era of truly needing a big budget PC has been over for a while. It's just for gaming and AI now. Maybe not even gaming as much anymore. Consider the perspective of someone who has a practically unlimited budget for PCs, doesn't game much anymore, and doesn't need AI to do their job. It's just part of getting older, and there are plenty of people in their late 30s and older on here.

p-e-w 4mo ago

No need. You can run the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 MoE models with as little as 12 GB of VRAM at 30-40 tps (Q4/Q5), and they both blow GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 out of the water.

swatcoder 4mo ago

Sure, but it's also not really out of scale with the cost of a shop tool in other trades. If you're a professional that's confident in a positive return on the investment (optimal or not), or just a hobbyist with the luxury budget for a "shop" that cost is well within norms. That's not everybody, of course, but it's not some inconceivable fantasy. A lot of people in the tech community here on HN, specifically, end up with pretty high discretionary budgets that they pour into stuff like this.

frollogaston 4mo ago
But you can get that return from a paid service too, in fact it'll be better. So just comparing costs, what's the annualized ROI on the Mac Studio assuming it means you avoid paying $240/y for Claude? Cause I can always set aside the Mac's price in some investments and pay for Claude out of that.
- swatcoder 4mo ago
  Same with many and their shop tools in other trades. Most hobbyists and many professionals could end up far ahead financially by leveraging makerspaces, tool rentals, and co-op shops or even by hiring out a professional to prep certain intermediates for them, but they get psychological value -- as well as flexibility, reliability, and resale opportunity -- from having their own well-outfitted shop. And they can afford that premium, so they do. At the scale of individuals and small shops, not everything that matters gets captured in financial models.
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    Yeah but the local model doesn't have those advantages for the coding use cases, at least not yet. In theory you could post-train one on your codebase or something, but nobody cares to do that when any vanilla coding agent service can read and understand the whole thing better than a locally tuned free model. I was already being very generous towards the Mac in pretending it does the same thing as the paid service. Aside, physical tools tend to be financially advantageous to own if you're going to use them a lot. Even if the owner were targeting 0 profit, they'd have to charge more to factor in the cost of dealing with customers and increased risk of wear/damage by users who don't care as much.

amalcon 4mo ago

A Strix Halo with similar RAM is considerably cheaper. Still not cheap, mind, but performance is OK (not great) and it will run more or less the same models.

AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
At least for me, it's been pretty great, but I bought my system when it was $1800, now looks like the same system is $2700 and out of stock. I still haven't quite been able to run 120B parameter models under Windows, but for Qwen Coder 30B, it works pretty darn well for my at home needs.
- amalcon 4mo ago
  Yeah, they have gone up a lot since I bought mine too. I did get Qwen3.5-122b running on all-GPU (on a 128GB machine) under a minimal Arch Linux setup (I do my GUI work on a much cheaper box). It worked, but Qwen3.6-35b is performing almost as well and a lot faster. Still cheaper than a new Mac. Maybe not cheaper than a used one.
  - AbsurdCensor 4mo ago
    I've certainly thought about just moving the box to Linux, but it took far to long personally to get everything running under AMD and it works 'well enough' that I don't want to make the switch. I tried playing with GAIA on it, felt a bit limited, and now have Hermes up and running, and that seems to work quite well. All the tools are changing so quickly, it's sometimes difficult to settle in on 'what's best', so I certainly can understand folks that just want to pay for a AI subscription and be done with it.

dofm 4mo ago

[dead]

anarticle 4mo ago

Pros buy their own tools. This is why working for yourself is better than working for a corpo, you get to choose your weapon.

_doctor_love 4mo ago
That's daft mate
- anarticle 4mo ago
  Is it? When you're inside the fence you get some IT cast off from the last guy that was cleaned up and re-spywared from 2-3y ago (sometimes worse!). As a hired gun (data science/engineer), I have an m3 128gb 1tb all sliders to the right MacBook Pro that works great, no spyware, rocket fast, trains/runs small models. With Apple 0%, paid in a year. I generally can name my price so it pays for itself. If you're riding it every day, every little speed up counts. I don't wait on GitHub actions or external systems for my crunching. For that I have my local slurm cluster of mini PCs, 64 cpus and counting! I assure you there is a better world outside of the fence, I am unlikely to return.
  - _doctor_love 4mo ago
    I'm curious the last time you touched reality
    - anarticle 4mo ago
      Not really sure what you're getting at there, I was a hired gun for about a year, founded a company and am having a great time. Last time I was at a corporate gig, I got a 2+ year old base model MacBook Pro to do a data science. 16gb of ram is fun and all, but when you're using R you're going to have a bad time. During my hired gun period I worked with two organizations that used gitlab, and they're doing just fine. One place I had no problem using their cloud for bigger runs, the other had a permission system that was pissing me off so I solved my own problem and billed them enough it didn't matter anyhow. Like I said, having extra cpus for big R runs you don't have to ask anyone for has a value all its own. Happy computing!