I don’t think we should use current prices as landmarks for large scale demand. That Studio’s current prices is inflated because of a (presumably) short term supply crunch, not because the average user is willing to pay $24k for a home AI inference device.
It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.
But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.
512GB M3 Ultra is out of stock, not coming back, and there’s nothing like it on the consumer market. That’s the reason they go for so much.