4 ms·

The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusias

The 512GB Ultra is amazing, sure. But who is it for exactly? VC funded big spender founders? In that case why would they need local AI? The ultra rich enthusiast? But there can't be too many of those. So who actually buys these?

skinfaxi 1mo ago
A number of people in these comments, it would seem.
- usrnm 1mo ago
  So, rich enthusiasts it is, then
  - fearmerchant 1mo ago
    I'm going to buy one to watch youtube videos and surf social media.
    - grumpyprole 1mo ago
      And to read rumour sites about the next model.
ericd 1mo ago
I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families. Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.
- iammrpayments 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ericd 1mo ago
    Weird swipe, I'm not trying to sell it to you, this is just where I see it going, and why these things are going to sell (and why 512 gig M3 Ultra Mac Studios have skyrocketed in demand/price). It's not been an empty promise, in that it's been providing lots of very concrete value to us already.
  - marknutter 1mo ago
    What exactly is empty about any of what he wrote?
  - evanjrowley 1mo ago
    Members of my C-suite are doing this today on a raspberry pi, so the promise is not empty. Key difference is they aren't using local AI to do it. For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches. Three possibilities: 1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on). 2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing. 3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.
    - ericd 1mo ago
      If you actually want to learn, highly recommend a visit to https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/. People there are running stacks of 2-4x DGX Sparks to get to similar levels of memory, at similar cost.
SXX 1mo ago
You can connect up to 4 of them via RDMA so 2TB total RAM. Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.
- serf 1mo ago
  also way slower if we're just going against 'nvidia hardware'.
  - SXX 1mo ago
    Even at high announced pricing 4 of them still much more accessible than any Nvidia solution with same amount of VRAM,
LeBit 1mo ago
For some , the idea that some proprietary information could potentially leak is enough to justify any price.
serf 1mo ago
this comment has always existed behind every apple release, most especially anything vaguely pro-ish. to answer your question : looking at the aftermarket availability of Apple's prior best and brightest : practically no one buys them. "people here buy them" , well, 'here' is one of the most affluent groups of people in the world. They're available as movie and television set pieces (undoubtedly disappearing into the home of someone close to the staff post-production), and for administrative/boss types that can slip the cost into a ledger somewhere that few will ever see. It has been a hobby of mine every few years to check out the apple site and see how big I can option a machine. My record was when I was in high school years ago and was able to option some pro studio-ish apple desktop thing to like 61,000 usd out the door.
- avalys 1mo ago
  Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense. For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one. For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
  - michaelbuckbee 1mo ago
    Movie production (editors, sound design, and a portion of fx work).
j45 1mo ago
Companies used to have local server rooms in their office, like mini centers, and buy all the equipment end to end. It’s when self hosting and local hosting was the norm, and why it’s also starting to come back. There will be workloads that can never touch a public cloud, and for it solutions like this are an option.
lenerdenator 1mo ago
Local AI is the future, and a lot of people want the first mover advantage or to toy around with it. I know a guy with a small rack of Nvidia Spark machines that he uses for that purpose; it's as much as a decent used car.
- brianwawok 1mo ago
  But is it? If it’s cheap enough latency doesn’t matter. Unlike say cloud gaming, where latency does matter. I’ll take my games local and my text bots cloud
  - lenerdenator 1mo ago
    Of course. People are valuing privacy now, and it's almost inevitable that humans will seek to have more agency over a social contact, even if it's an artificial one.
    - brianwawok 1mo ago
      History has shown me people value convenience and cheapness and maybe safety. Privacy is far down the list for 99% of the world
      - lenerdenator 1mo ago
        The first three are starting to get more closely associated with privacy. Convenience: if I want information from a chatbot, I don't want to have to hear how I can save on my car insurance by switching to another insurance company. That's basically what websites have become. Go to any American local news station's site. It's just wallpapered with ads and you'll inevitably get a popup asking to subscribe. I don't want that from my chatbot. Cheapness: this doesn't matter over the long run because inevitably, both straight-up monetary payment and revenue generated by invading privacy become part of the service providers' revenue streams, if they don't start out that way. Cable TV used to be ad-free, as did streaming services. Then there was a need to fund the coke habits of some finance guys in Lower Manhattan, so ads were introduced as a "free" tier. Now there's only "reduced" ads on the paid tier, and you still fork over your data to let service providers give advertising clients a better profile of you. Safety: identity thieves, stalkers, and even government agents acting against the law use commercial data sources to do things they otherwise couldn't. Imagine what they could glean from chatbot or other AI sources. If you're your own LLM service provider, none of this is a problem.
try-working 1mo ago
Twitter users.
tencentshill 1mo ago
The competition is a custom multi-GPU NVIDIA RTX pro desktop, which go for much much more. $20k is cheap for 512GB addressable memory. The old mac pro could easily be configured to cost that much.
mschuetz 1mo ago
I know people who would get it for local LLMs for use in their company.
maherbeg 1mo ago
If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)
- ericd 1mo ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure people realize how expensive ZDR/Zero Data Retention is, and how important it is to a lot of businesses, this kind of thing starts looking really cheap really fast if it's a reasonable substitute.
- ltbarcly3 1mo ago
  I don't think this is accurate. Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes. But lets do the math: Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption). Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation. Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you: The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month. But this fails because: - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day. - During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads). - In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now. this leads to: Workstation 1 Sol Pro 2 Sol Pro Monthly cost $700 $200 $400 Raw capacity (hrs) 720 120 240 Usable capacity (hrs) 100-130 120 240 Concurrent sessions 1 3-5 6-10 $ per usable hour ~$6.00 $1.67 $1.67 Usable hours per $700 ~115 ~420 ~420
eigenspace 1mo ago
If you want to run reasonably big, local AI models, what are your alternatives? That may not be many people, but there certainly will be some people who want to do that, and are willing to pay big bucks to do so.
mikert89 1mo ago
you can run open source models in the privacy of your own home :)
zitterbewegung 1mo ago
Other than the local AI crowd which is much recent it is professionals using Final Cut Pro for video editing, Logic Pro as a DAW and music production, Video transcoding, Photoshop and other tasks for high performance computing that don't need Laptops but want above 128GB of ram and prefer a Mac. Then there is the obvious group of developers that are making Apps for all of their products. Also, these are great for the workplace. AI is much more recent thing that Apple products were used for. If Apple didn't sold these things they wouldn't make them but, also the level of marketing that Apple is talking about for AI is basically the new group they need to capture because the ones I just listed are already buying Macs and or easily to motivate with the other obvious CPU / GPU performance upgrades for code compilation, faster memory and video transcoding.
DrScientist 1mo ago
Remember core customers of Apple studio type products is content creation/video editing, etc. AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation. For example Apple mentioned performance increases for https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_nodes/copycat.html https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_n...
sanderjd 1mo ago
I think "ultra rich enthusiast" is in the right ballpark. There are people betting on being able to create their own revenue generating products and services with their own local hardware and very little operating costs. That may or may not make sense as a business idea. But people with wealth and risk appetite trying a new kind of business model and cost structure has a strong tradition. Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen. My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.
Aurornis 1mo ago
Enthusiasts buying these for fun are not the target market. These aren’t big sellers to begin with but a lot of the sales are going to companies where people have budgets for gear like this and can make a business case for it. This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
Mistletoe 1mo ago
I always just assume that super expensive computers are like hot rods and an expensive hobby.
c0rruptbytes 1mo ago
it's for me
teaearlgraycold 1mo ago
My friend plans to get the 512GiB M5 Ultra ASAP. He makes money by selling synthetic data and training models for companies in San Francisco and it's the cheapest way to be able to do that on your own local hardware. It's also a bit irrational as he could save money by just renting, but I get the appeal of owning something outright.
sinpif 1mo ago
John Siracusa, for sure. He's not getting an EV. He's getting this.
kylehotchkiss 1mo ago
I realize it's not a 512, but for context on why I ordered a 96GB. $95/month after a trade in. I'll use it for a long term project where I'm building a national sized dataset/processing video transcripts with a rubric (of churches/sermon health). I'm willing to trade SOTA models for local ones for cost of regenerating/model consistency/ethical reasons. I'll find other ways to use the power though, opencode or maybe start working on more video projects.
zmmmmm 1mo ago
Anyone dealing with sensitive or regulated data can get started instantly with local models where they may need time consuming process or complexities to send sensitive data outside.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
dongliliu 1mo ago
Aside from high-spending users, I think many people use it as a productivity tool. If you can use it to make money, and the money you earn far exceeds the monthly payment, why not make your work smoother?

skinfaxi 1mo ago

A number of people in these comments, it would seem.

usrnm 1mo ago
So, rich enthusiasts it is, then
- fearmerchant 1mo ago
  I'm going to buy one to watch youtube videos and surf social media.
  - grumpyprole 1mo ago
    And to read rumour sites about the next model.

ericd 1mo ago

I think there's some mental inertia around what a computer is and what it's worth. This thing can build custom software for you, mostly autonomously. It can monitor things happening on the internet that are relevant to you, in a holistic and flexible way. We have one crawling the web for local events we'll like, and it judges them based on what it knows about us, and it tells us about the best matches every weekend, which has yielded some awesome outings we wouldn't have known about. It reads the literature on a subject in seconds and uses it as context to help in decision support. It's not the same value proposition as a computer 3 years ago, where most people are mentally anchored on what a computer should cost. Having it at home means that you can use it as a personal agent that always puts your interests first, regardless of what ad model the commercial providers decide to put in, and you can stash in it your medical data, what you buy, what you make, your worries, hopes, and dreams, without worrying about that being used as training data, or worse, something to exploit you commercially. I think it'll become considered totally reasonable to consider spending the cost of a small car on a computer, for many families. Also, a lot of companies are looking at how to run capable models locally to cut some of their (massive) cloud AI bills. An easy answer is worth a lot to them.

iammrpayments 1mo ago
[flagged]
- ericd 1mo ago
  Weird swipe, I'm not trying to sell it to you, this is just where I see it going, and why these things are going to sell (and why 512 gig M3 Ultra Mac Studios have skyrocketed in demand/price). It's not been an empty promise, in that it's been providing lots of very concrete value to us already.
- marknutter 1mo ago
  What exactly is empty about any of what he wrote?
- evanjrowley 1mo ago
  Members of my C-suite are doing this today on a raspberry pi, so the promise is not empty. Key difference is they aren't using local AI to do it. For the M5 Ultra, I suspect it would be valuable for someone who wants to achieve all the above and more, but with local AI due to data privacy concerns, and also not regulated data that comes with lots of other requirements solved by more traditional approaches. Three possibilities: 1. The type of person who deals with lots of intellectual property using expensive Mac-only desktop applications that aren't meant for servers, whose mind has formed positive associations with the term "Apple Intelligence", whose values overlap with Apple's lawyer's values, who actually stands to profit from having a Mac that's more powerful than anyone else's Mac, whose long-term goals are not impacted by planned obsolecense on a piece of computer hardware costing over $25k ($50k after 1TB SSD add-on). 2. Trust fund beneficiary who wants to show off, LARP as #1, prime target for Apple's marketing. 3. 2026 kit for billionare-class iPad babies. All brain rot content is 100% local AI-generated. Never have to speak to your children again. A true "we have dead internet theory at home" machine.
  - ericd 1mo ago
    If you actually want to learn, highly recommend a visit to https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/. People there are running stacks of 2-4x DGX Sparks to get to similar levels of memory, at similar cost.

SXX 1mo ago

You can connect up to 4 of them via RDMA so 2TB total RAM. Its cheaper than Nvidia AI hardware.

serf 1mo ago
also way slower if we're just going against 'nvidia hardware'.
- SXX 1mo ago
  Even at high announced pricing 4 of them still much more accessible than any Nvidia solution with same amount of VRAM,

LeBit 1mo ago

For some , the idea that some proprietary information could potentially leak is enough to justify any price.

serf 1mo ago

this comment has always existed behind every apple release, most especially anything vaguely pro-ish. to answer your question : looking at the aftermarket availability of Apple's prior best and brightest : practically no one buys them. "people here buy them" , well, 'here' is one of the most affluent groups of people in the world. They're available as movie and television set pieces (undoubtedly disappearing into the home of someone close to the staff post-production), and for administrative/boss types that can slip the cost into a ledger somewhere that few will ever see. It has been a hobby of mine every few years to check out the apple site and see how big I can option a machine. My record was when I was in high school years ago and was able to option some pro studio-ish apple desktop thing to like 61,000 usd out the door.

avalys 1mo ago
Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense. For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one. For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
- michaelbuckbee 1mo ago
  Movie production (editors, sound design, and a portion of fx work).

j45 1mo ago

Companies used to have local server rooms in their office, like mini centers, and buy all the equipment end to end. It’s when self hosting and local hosting was the norm, and why it’s also starting to come back. There will be workloads that can never touch a public cloud, and for it solutions like this are an option.

lenerdenator 1mo ago

Local AI is the future, and a lot of people want the first mover advantage or to toy around with it. I know a guy with a small rack of Nvidia Spark machines that he uses for that purpose; it's as much as a decent used car.

brianwawok 1mo ago
But is it? If it’s cheap enough latency doesn’t matter. Unlike say cloud gaming, where latency does matter. I’ll take my games local and my text bots cloud
- lenerdenator 1mo ago
  Of course. People are valuing privacy now, and it's almost inevitable that humans will seek to have more agency over a social contact, even if it's an artificial one.
  - brianwawok 1mo ago
    History has shown me people value convenience and cheapness and maybe safety. Privacy is far down the list for 99% of the world
    - lenerdenator 1mo ago
      The first three are starting to get more closely associated with privacy. Convenience: if I want information from a chatbot, I don't want to have to hear how I can save on my car insurance by switching to another insurance company. That's basically what websites have become. Go to any American local news station's site. It's just wallpapered with ads and you'll inevitably get a popup asking to subscribe. I don't want that from my chatbot. Cheapness: this doesn't matter over the long run because inevitably, both straight-up monetary payment and revenue generated by invading privacy become part of the service providers' revenue streams, if they don't start out that way. Cable TV used to be ad-free, as did streaming services. Then there was a need to fund the coke habits of some finance guys in Lower Manhattan, so ads were introduced as a "free" tier. Now there's only "reduced" ads on the paid tier, and you still fork over your data to let service providers give advertising clients a better profile of you. Safety: identity thieves, stalkers, and even government agents acting against the law use commercial data sources to do things they otherwise couldn't. Imagine what they could glean from chatbot or other AI sources. If you're your own LLM service provider, none of this is a problem.

try-working 1mo ago

Twitter users.

tencentshill 1mo ago

The competition is a custom multi-GPU NVIDIA RTX pro desktop, which go for much much more. $20k is cheap for 512GB addressable memory. The old mac pro could easily be configured to cost that much.

mschuetz 1mo ago

I know people who would get it for local LLMs for use in their company.

maherbeg 1mo ago

If I can get Sol level capabilities on a $20k machine, then it is well worth it for my employer to buy me that machine for work as a workstation. When you start paying in tokens vs subscription costs due to enterprise agreements, you really start to see how much cash utilizing frontier models at the frontier costs (and I'm efficiently using luna and other models where possible!)

ericd 1mo ago
Yeah, I'm not sure people realize how expensive ZDR/Zero Data Retention is, and how important it is to a lot of businesses, this kind of thing starts looking really cheap really fast if it's a reasonable substitute.
ltbarcly3 1mo ago
I don't think this is accurate. Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes. But lets do the math: Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption). Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation. Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you: The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month. But this fails because: - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day. - During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads). - In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now. this leads to: Workstation 1 Sol Pro 2 Sol Pro Monthly cost $700 $200 $400 Raw capacity (hrs) 720 120 240 Usable capacity (hrs) 100-130 120 240 Concurrent sessions 1 3-5 6-10 $ per usable hour ~$6.00 $1.67 $1.67 Usable hours per $700 ~115 ~420 ~420

eigenspace 1mo ago

If you want to run reasonably big, local AI models, what are your alternatives? That may not be many people, but there certainly will be some people who want to do that, and are willing to pay big bucks to do so.

mikert89 1mo ago

you can run open source models in the privacy of your own home :)

zitterbewegung 1mo ago

Other than the local AI crowd which is much recent it is professionals using Final Cut Pro for video editing, Logic Pro as a DAW and music production, Video transcoding, Photoshop and other tasks for high performance computing that don't need Laptops but want above 128GB of ram and prefer a Mac. Then there is the obvious group of developers that are making Apps for all of their products. Also, these are great for the workplace. AI is much more recent thing that Apple products were used for. If Apple didn't sold these things they wouldn't make them but, also the level of marketing that Apple is talking about for AI is basically the new group they need to capture because the ones I just listed are already buying Macs and or easily to motivate with the other obvious CPU / GPU performance upgrades for code compilation, faster memory and video transcoding.

DrScientist 1mo ago

Remember core customers of Apple studio type products is content creation/video editing, etc. AI based tools are very useful here - thinks like object removable or cleanup etc, not just AI generation. For example Apple mentioned performance increases for https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_nodes/copycat.html https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide/air_n...

sanderjd 1mo ago

I think "ultra rich enthusiast" is in the right ballpark. There are people betting on being able to create their own revenue generating products and services with their own local hardware and very little operating costs. That may or may not make sense as a business idea. But people with wealth and risk appetite trying a new kind of business model and cost structure has a strong tradition. Put another way: If $25k is the full extent of the start up capital costs, and operating costs are very low, that is a much cheaper business to start than most! The question is whether this is actually a useful model for a revenue generating business. I think that remains to be seen. My guess is that there will be a few hits (which we'll hear a lot about - especially when someone actually pulls off "the first single-person unicorn", which I do suspect will happen someday) and a huuuge number of misses, which we won't hear much about.

Aurornis 1mo ago

Enthusiasts buying these for fun are not the target market. These aren’t big sellers to begin with but a lot of the sales are going to companies where people have budgets for gear like this and can make a business case for it. This is, sadly, probably a foreign concept to a lot of people who have only worked at companies where hardware purchases are viewed as something to minimize and everyone is stuck with the same low spec laptops that the finance department picked out. At companies where someone might have a legitimate use for a $20K machine, their fully loaded costs (not their salary) are $300K or more, and other teams like sales are spending thousands of dollars per week on things like travel and hotels for their job, spending $20K on a computer that’s going to last several years is not a hard choice.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

Mistletoe 1mo ago

I always just assume that super expensive computers are like hot rods and an expensive hobby.

c0rruptbytes 1mo ago

it's for me

teaearlgraycold 1mo ago

My friend plans to get the 512GiB M5 Ultra ASAP. He makes money by selling synthetic data and training models for companies in San Francisco and it's the cheapest way to be able to do that on your own local hardware. It's also a bit irrational as he could save money by just renting, but I get the appeal of owning something outright.

sinpif 1mo ago

John Siracusa, for sure. He's not getting an EV. He's getting this.

kylehotchkiss 1mo ago

I realize it's not a 512, but for context on why I ordered a 96GB. $95/month after a trade in. I'll use it for a long term project where I'm building a national sized dataset/processing video transcripts with a rubric (of churches/sermon health). I'm willing to trade SOTA models for local ones for cost of regenerating/model consistency/ethical reasons. I'll find other ways to use the power though, opencode or maybe start working on more video projects.

zmmmmm 1mo ago

Anyone dealing with sensitive or regulated data can get started instantly with local models where they may need time consuming process or complexities to send sensitive data outside.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

dongliliu 1mo ago

Aside from high-spending users, I think many people use it as a productivity tool. If you can use it to make money, and the money you earn far exceeds the monthly payment, why not make your work smoother?