alt Hacker NewsI feel like I'm going insane seeing people buy these 128gb MBP for thousands of dollars to run models that are objectively much worse than SOTA and spending so much more. The amount spent on a 128gb M5 MAX can buy you a damned new car here. What the hell am I missing? Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds?
(I'm aware the price is, in absolute terms, more expensive where I live compared to the USA. That reinforces what I think, because anyone sane that would've bought one of those in another country would sell them as soon as they landed here and save that money.)
Replies
I also don't understand why people in this price bracket are buying Mac laptops instead of desktop computers with GPUs? Just to flex that it's portable?
I think it's silly to go for a laptop form factor. Last fall I put together a workstation with two second-hand 3090s in it (paid $850CDN each, now the best I can find is $1200). With 48GB VRAM it's reasonable - and I've been using Qwen 3.6 27B for various tasks around building KGs from text corpora / reasoning about them.
I've ran comparisons against everything that's available on OpenRouter (well, as of few weeks ago), and for $0/tok, the local 27B Qwen can't be beat. Sure, it's slower, and yeah, the office is a few degrees warmer than it ought to be -- but nobody can pull the plug, nobody is watching over my shoulder, and the results are on par with SOTA.
Can't wait for a similarly sized Qwen 3.7 - from what I've seen so far, it's a leap ahead of the previous version.
If your workflow benefits from the speed it quickly pays for itself when factoring in developer salaries here in the US. I recently switched companies and they bought me an M5 Max 128GB as my dev machine.
Builds and local test runs are 3 times faster than the Windows laptop option. The machine will pay for itself just based on that within 3 months. I can spin up a local kubernetes cluster and do full integration tests while I am working on other things as well.
It isn’t a strictly Mac vs Windows thing though. It looks like the culprit is the MDM software on the Windows machines is just crazy slow and constantly getting in the way.
If I was paid less it would definitely make less sense for the company to pay for this machine.
It’s an asset on my balance sheet that’s already appreciating nicely and will likely be resale-able for what I paid for it for the next 7-10 years. I am on an Apple monthly installment plan so $5k is $416/month for 1 year, no interest. I’m able to run DS4 scale models and other open models without quantization, often multiple at once.
Imagine its value if war broke out over Taiwan / Greater China, or really any of the dark scenarios with global connectivity or the truthiness of commercially available models. It is a very, very difficult piece of equipment to make at any other moment in history. I wish I could have purchased more. I saw the signs and price trends and out of stocks as they unfolded. No doubt others with the means are stockpiling.
> Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds?
Yes. Your people earn an order of magnitude less income than Americans.
Yes they are, 6k is peanuts to a lot of people.
It's not always about the price or being the cheapest. For me, it's about freedom, both to play and from the govt/corp censorship.
> Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds?
Yes. Back in the my days at $faang in europe it was not uncommon to hear people getting 120-160 k€/year in compensation and we were “poor” compared to us engineers at the same faang (4-500 k$/year total compensation) with a bit of seniority…
Well, I can tell you how my thinking goes: 1) I don't buy my computer just to run LLMs and there are many scenarios where I benefit from both a decent GPU and from a large amount of RAM, 2) I run a solo-founder business which owns exactly one computer in the entire company so it might as well be a good one, and 3) I don't need a new car, so comparing pricing this way is irrelevant.
In other words, yes, buying this kind of machine only to run an LLM locally doesn't make sense, because local LLMs generally still suck for serious programming work (they work great for spam filtering though!). But more generally this machine makes sense for a lot of people.