alt Hacker NewsI did the math at least on a Macbook pro, and for inference it's definitely not worth it.
- https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05/17/offline-llm-ene... - Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168198
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joefourier • today at 6:45 PM
Why didn't you take into account batching, input tokens, different costs of electricity, and the fact that a laptop can still hold a decent % of its resale value, and is useful for many other tasks than running an LLM?
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It's comparing laptops to dedicated GPUs in a server environment. The best comparison would be the Mac Studio but the current release is almost 2 years old at this point. We'll see what a likely M5 Ultra Mac Studio looks like, probably in Q3 this year.
But yes, for pure inference, the M5 Max Macbook Pros probably aren't there yet. They have other utility though of course. And you can get 64GB and 128GB MBPs at a discount. Micro Center currently will let you buy a 64GB M5 Max MBP for under $4k currently, for example.