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Or 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 i
by paxys 2mo ago
Or 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo agoWhy is this a no brainer? There are both cheaper and faster options out there.
- AbsurdCensor 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo agoRates are around 3.5% right now before taxes.
- buerkle 2mo agoThere's still many high interest savings accounts that are at least 4%
- AbsurdCensor 2mo agoAnd you still need at least 5% to do what OP is suggesting.
- gruez 2mo 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 2mo agoDo you think the hardware will still be worth $25k once it is five years old?
- AbsurdCensor 2mo agoDo you think monthly AI 'subscriptions' are going to be $100 a month in 5 years? These people using these would probably be on $200/month subscriptions and with that OPs assertion of 'shoving away and paying with interest' makes no sense.
- jbs789 2mo agoIt’s fair to compare the two options. Our assumptions may differ - and that’s ok... The monthly costs may go down too.
- sanderjd 2mo agoIsn't there something to be said for owning your own hardware though?
- bigyabai 2mo agoNot if it's 5-10x slower than a remote inference server. Mac prefill latency is exhausting.
- sanderjd 2mo agoOh tell me more about prefill latency.
- jamiek88 2mo agoM5 changed that a lot though - it could still be better but 4x improvement made it cross the frustratingly slow barrier for me.
- spwa4 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago[dead]
- twobitshifter 2mo 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