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So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of toke
by intrasight 1mo ago
So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.
EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.
- physicalecon 1mo ago[dead]
- garciasn 1mo agoWith the way RAM prices are going up, you could expect to make 20% profit on any purchase.
- intrasight 1mo agoI tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.
- d_runs_far 1mo agoHad I done that as well, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten intrigued by HyperCard, then Director/Authorware, then Flash, then HTML, then...
- paxys 1mo agoOr more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.
- bilbo0s 1mo agoThis is the real answer. Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need. Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.
- intrasight 1mo agoI don't need privacy, so it would be financially imprudent for me to spend 20 grand on such a machine. But I have a financial management client who does need such privacy, and if I get more fully engaged with them then I would be able to justify getting a loaded Mac.
- throwa356262 1mo agoWhy is this a no brainer? There are both cheaper and faster options out there.
- AbsurdCensor 1mo agoNot 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.
- spacephysics 1mo agoMoney market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.
- wonnage 1mo agoRates are around 3.5% right now before taxes.
- buerkle 1mo agoThere's still many high interest savings accounts that are at least 4%
- AbsurdCensor 1mo agoAnd you still need at least 5% to do what OP is suggesting.
- gruez 1mo ago>Money market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under ??? 30 Day SEC Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.61% 12m Trailing Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.74% https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month-treasury-bond-etf https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month... 1.39% might not seem like a lot, but that's off by more than a quarter.
- mkjs 1mo agoDo you think the hardware will still be worth $25k once it is five years old?
- sanderjd 1mo agoIsn't there something to be said for owning your own hardware though?
- bigyabai 1mo agoNot if it's 5-10x slower than a remote inference server. Mac prefill latency is exhausting.
- sanderjd 1mo agoOh tell me more about prefill latency.
- jamiek88 1mo agoM5 changed that a lot though - it could still be better but 4x improvement made it cross the frustratingly slow barrier for me.
- spwa4 1mo agoCurrently m5 max has a prefill rate for Qwen 3.8 27B of 400+ tok/s, then generate at ~60 tok/s. (And it can be improved further, the software is not yet at the level it is for CUDA) That means for context under ~5k or so ttft (time to first token) it's going to respond faster than Claude. If the answer is less than ~1k I think the request finishes sooner. And it's ~claude 4.5 or 4.6 level intelligence. I've had it work for more than a day on a pi.dev "loop engineering" project involving writing software. Plus privacy. Plus offline.
- kphorn 1mo agoIt’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment. For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions. 25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?) At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference. For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose
- jbs789 1mo agoYeah I think you call out the right incentives. Lots of people are very interested in renting out the hardware, and it gives us lots of flexibility vs buying. If the pace of hardware change is what the jensens of the world say, then the rents on existing hardware will decline.
- physicalecon 1mo ago[dead]
- twobitshifter 1mo agoWhy are we comparing to the maxed out model only? The M5 Ultra with 96 GB, 1 TB, and 64 GPU cores is $5499. Apple lets you lease that model for $110/month for 36 months. If you can settle for a M5 Max base model that would be a $49/month lease. Today, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 - 27B amazingly well on either which is giving comparable performance to 5.6 Luna on SWE Bench. The local models are now getting better and more efficient and this should give you headroom. Tools like turbo fieldfare are really reducing the memory requirements to run large models and I don’t see it stopping soon. https://github.com/drumih/turbo-fieldfare https://github.com/drumih/turbo-fieldfare
- ziofill 1mo agowhere are downpayments so cheap? I'll move there ^^'
- derwiki 1mo agoCoshocton, Ohio, plenty of houses for <100k
- brookst 1mo agoOn second thought...
- intrasight 1mo agoThere are 70 houses for sale in Pittsburgh for $25K or less
- kridsdale1 1mo agoYeah my down payment 10 years ago was $200,000. The house has appreciated 0%. I sold meta shares to buy it. Those would be worth a million now. … I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.
- selectodude 1mo agoHaving a place to live is an investment in your health and wellbeing. Can't live in a stock option.
- christoff12 1mo agoAt the time, were you aware that you could borrow against your portfolio?
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoAnd when they get margin called in March 2020? Maybe they had the cash on hand, maybe they didn’t. Assuming they are in the family formation stage of life with young kids, an outlier risk appetite would be required to sleep well at night.
- chrsw 1mo agoWhere I’m from $25k is the down payment on a parking space in a garage, not an entire house (or condo).
- saturn8601 1mo ago>The house will get more valuable Depends on where you live. Also keep in mind population decline so long term, im not so sure. Prices already dropping in less desirable places (everywhere outside of most blue areas) (Assuming you are talking about the US sorry if not)
- moomoo11 1mo agowhy not buy the maxed out mac and then buy a metaverse house that you can live in virtually problem solved /s