alt Hacker NewsWhy 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.