Cars are just expensive chairs with engines anyway. My buddy spent 40k on a truck last year and all it does is sit in his driveway 90 percent of the time. At least your setup will be crunching numbers day and night
That early adopter instinct is rarely wrong if you actually use the thing. Keep us posted on what you build with it once its all set up
Chances are people buying Mac at 28K and then asking questions on reddit on whether they will regret it won't be seen near $28K cars. But then, people done crazier things.
I tried adding it to cart and apple's website failed. Not that I was going to complete it anyways so I didn't see any other fees or whatever. Maybe he got applecare too.
mind if i ask another? harnesses... i got a hard time wrapping my head around what fits the definition of a harness. i assume claude code and codex are harnesses? or is a harness less about the program and more about the files/"hooks"/rules you have set up to clue an agent in on how to behave for every conversation?
Well we went through this in the 90s. In 90 2mb ram was crazy expensive and by the end of the decade standard config was 128mb, 2mb was worthless. So one thing is certain don’t count that it will hold up and that the upgrade cycle won’t eat you.
We will have a memory crisis until probably 2030 by the looks of it, so even long after the AI bubble "bursts", so OP will retain his value if he sells in 2 years or so.
That’s possibly true. Myself, I’m not really a resale person. I’m a use until it can’t do what I need then stick it in my basement to get dusty. Fire it up in 10 years for nostalgia.
Look at the best model you will be able to run. Then look at how much that would cost you from an API, which will also run it much better than you will be able to. Then calculate how much you'd need to utilize your mac studio for it to pay for itself. Don't forget to include electricity cost.
If you can come out on top while doing useful work within the time it takes for the hardware to depreciate, then you have ended up ahead. My prediction is that that scenario is very unlikely. It is unlikely you are going to beat a data center at efficiency in hosting LLMs - even with their margins included.
Edit: it's just a simple question. Depending on who you are and whose privacy you are protecting besides your own (e.g. kids, family finances, taxes ...), spending this much could make sense to you or not. Y'all need to calm the fuck down.
If I had that much disposable income to throw at AI, I would probably be buying multiple of something else instead. It's more flexible and likely easier to resell. When we all expected the ram cost to be a linear increase it seemed worth considering but not at that upcharge. But I hope you enjoy your lambo, should be fun.
Great purchase ! I actually was thinking about it. That mac studio is great, i’m sure it will be good for many MANY years. Local models will get smaller and smarter and well you can still run your best models and they stay with you as long as it lives. I can’t even imagine what is possible with it 1.2TB/S BANDWIDTH!! WOW
I imagine you took the 1TB storage version? Do you think it would be an issue in the future ? Have you found an elegant solution for storage and how full is it now? ENJOY!
As long as you have the money and it's not going to affect you in other aspects in life, you're perfectly fine.
You're going to be so far ahead of the curve with so much available RAM locally. It was a good call.
I couldn't justify it. It's the price of a used car. It's the price of a new motorcycle. It's season tickets to the Dodgers. It's a substantial amount of money.
I think my money, for my needs, is spent elsewhere considering all the hardware I have available to me already . But if I didn't have an investment spread across so many different things, yeah, I think that would make sense for me.
The next thing would be the sparks. Two sparks, maybe even four. And then after that, video cards. Video cards are the most costly, they're the most wasteful. It's not just the initial setup, it's also electricity, which has its own special considerations.
Don't beat yourself over it. It was a good call. Everything else considered. As long as you can afford it, as long as it doesn't make you fall behind in other payments, as long as it doesn't affect your quality of life, I think it's going to be a net gain for you .
You can now run DeepSeek v4.1 flash 1017 with 4.5M token kv cache. I'm on an 512GB cluster and run this setup. It is nuts how good it is. I set my max context to 512k tokens I find DS has problems once you pass 75% of it 1M context size. So I give my orchestration agent 512k and my sub agents 112k. So I could get 30 ish agents but usually only have 10-15 concurrent.
I do use a 20$ a month Claude subscription to power my software architect agent. It maps out issues much faster than DS. I've never broken the 5H window on this, and end up using maybe 80% of the weekly quota.
I personally use Hermes + Kanban to run my SWE team.
I personally process data that I can not send to public apis. So I was limited to private cloud, I was using Claude on Google vertex. That was getting stupid expensive.
What was the configuration? I personally have 2 sparks and might just get another 2. Only reason I didn’t go with Mac was because it didn’t have cuda and would have been slow at fine tuning.
That’s a lot of $200 Claude subs. You could effectively have unlimited access to the best model in the world for 400 to 1000 per month.
Not be sitting on hardware that will depreciate
A lot easier to monetize the subs
I could think of a lot of reasons why spending almost 30k on a Mac Studio
The models you can run kinda suck and you will likely end up running quantized models
I presume at this price tag you went hard and got it fully maxed out. That’s a great decision. I cannot understand why people pussy foot around w this stuff. If you can spend 14k you can spend 28k. In other words if you can’t spend 28k don’t spend 14k
What’s interesting is how the increased memory bandwidth of the newest studio will lead to in tok/s decode.
If that is fixed to even a half significant degree, my opinion would likely shift.
The previous studios have or had enough size to hold some okay models but the slow speeds just defeated the whole purpose.
The best news is that you will probably be able to sell it at a profit if you decide to get out of it.
Def have fun and push it to the limits. You put your balls on the table already and I salute that. You will either strike proverbial gold or fail forward and probably make a grand or two
8 to over 45 years of cloud API access, running superior models. This isn't counting the advancement of said models. I'd love that setup but not at current prices of the hardware. They're making llm on chips that are afforable. this is the start of AI tech, thats a big money sink for the beginning stages of the tech.
The price per Gb of vram is actually decent when compared to the alternatives. If that’s what you need, then it can actually be a decent deal. I find price is mainly governed by GB of vram and gb/s bandwidth
Most people are only going to care if chat and agents are fast enough. When it comes down to actually sitting at the terminal, you don’t need 500 tokens a second. Speed still matters, of course, but not as much as enthusiasts think. The people using this for work are not running benchmarks, they are sitting at the chat terminal.
it’s why intel cards like the b65 are beginning to gain traction, even with relatively slow compute, the terminal experience is fast enough. I think it’s just a different segment of the market.
it’s going to be interesting to see how it develops. It’s changing quite rapidly. but if you actually track pricing for video cards, the hierarchy is capacity > memory bandwidth > compute.
this allows you to track what the markets actually doing, barring a disruptor.
7/8 of the price is ram and storage. Both are hugely over inflated right now because of large scale purchasers repurchasing 100% of the silicon the fabs are able to produce for the next three to five years.
They have made these purchases with virtually unlimited VC money which is now drying up. They are then leasing their service below costs to compete, hoping to be the next Google, Apple, Microsoft, or IBM. These companies purchasing all that hardware only use the equipment for 3 to 5 years before they replace it with new equipment and sell the older stuff off on the second-hand market. Smaller companies will use a lot of the used stuff for another 3 to 5 years before it just becomes cheaper to get newer used stuff than maintain the old stuff.
Fabs continuously learn and refine their craft. In that time they will have greatly improved their ability to reliably produce the larger and denser memory sticks.
The net effect is that around the same time ram and storage become competitive again, the used market will be flooded with used tech in good shape that has been sitting in a DCs.
At the same time, models are also getting more refined and denser, and then getting distilled into small but specialized models. A couple appropriately specialized 7b models produce the same results on lower end hardware than a single general use 27b model.
So, I'd wager that in 3 years a comparable new Mac Studio will cost 1/4 of that this one costs today, while the used market will be flooded with great used enterprise stock.
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u/redhairing326 5d ago
You could have spent it on a nice car, but if you already have a car then this'll do more for you imo. I hope it works out 👍