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The 128GB M5 Max MBP I ordered at launch was $7049 and is now $9849 for the same configuration, that's nearly a 30% price increase and more than $2000 bump. Du
by tristor 4mo ago
The 128GB M5 Max MBP I ordered at launch was $7049 and is now $9849 for the same configuration, that's nearly a 30% price increase and more than $2000 bump. During the same time from launch to now, I have seen local LLMs get significantly better, to the point that I wish more people had hardware like this to be able to localize their workloads. I can't help but think society is moving in the wrong direction with this technology by further centralizing in hyperscalars and damaging the hardware market to make strong general purpose computing even more difficult for individuals to obtain, when the right direction would be democratization of both the hardware and the software to allow most workloads to be run locally.
- kamranjon 4mo agoI really think this is a coordinated effort to restrict computing capacity for individuals and force adoption of centralized AI - I think there already is evidence of this from the moves OpenAI had made to lock up memory and gpu markets.
- aroman 4mo agoWho exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
- angoragoats 4mo ago> Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
- varispeed 4mo agoThe rich.
- fsflover 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673500
- kamranjon 4mo agoI think one of the more ominous things to see in recent years was all of the tech execs at the presidential inauguration, after having collectively donated several million dollars to the inauguration fund. So if we go with that list, which happens to overlap with many of the circular deals we’ve seen in the AI space recently, you’d have people like: Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin I also wouldn’t be surprised if memory providers weren’t intimately involved, as they’ve been caught price fixing in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- bigyabai 4mo agoWe have to get real, here - most people are not replacing GPT or Claude with local inference, even on M5. If you can afford to do that (RAM shortage or not), then you are in the minority of customers. Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.
- kamranjon 4mo agoYou’re out of the loop if you don’t think m series chips with unified memory aren’t one of the best platforms for running local inference
- bigyabai 4mo agoThey aren't. Apple Silicon is unusable for interactive prefill and decode speeds in agentic workflows and SOTA LLMs.
- kamranjon 4mo agoYou’re just out of the loop, and that’s fine but it’s worth learning about. There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode. I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model. I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.
- tristor 4mo agoRelated, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...
- orlp 4mo agoYou save a lot less after paying import duties.
- tristor 4mo agoDo you pay import duties in the UK on items purchased for personal use? The situation is changing constantly in the US, but generally speaking you do pay duties only over a certain dollar amount in value if you intend to keep the item in country after importation (and a MBP would be over that amount), but it's a fairly small percentage (around $400 in duties on $3149 saved here). I'm not sure how it'd work in the UK.
- orlp 4mo agoIt seems like there aren't extra duties (anymore), but then again it's all very confusing and hard to navigate so who knows.
- jorvi 4mo agoThe EU price includes the warranty, which is at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.
- freediddy 4mo agoDo you really think the warranty justifies that price differential? A warranty only protects against manufacturers defects.
- medvezhenok 4mo ago
- sixothree 4mo agoI had one in my cart last night. It seems far less appealing today. There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
- jnwatson 4mo agoI would get nervous carrying around a $10k laptop.
- tristor 4mo agoI get more nervous not carrying it around when I travel. It's a lot easier to steal things that aren't on your person. That said, I get what you mean. I cover my photography gear with insurance and the computer since it is used for my photography (in addition to local LLMs) is covered under that insurance also.