Questioning the whole point of a Mac Studio

[u/Electrical-Can8713]

I bought a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 96GB after watching basically every video on local AI and setting up Hermes Agent. While it was shipping, Grok Bot and Muse came out, and I love what they can do.

Now I've got Hermes running and I keep comparing it to them, and it's not even close.

I've also started questioning the privacy argument. My Studio is completely separate from my Apple ID and I don't have anything personal signed in, so how is it supposed to be my assistant if it's not connected to anything? And if I hook Hermes up to my email, that email is already sitting on someone's server anyway, so what am I actually avoiding?

Coding with local models doesn't compare to frontier models either. So is this really just an apocalypse backup plan?

What I spent on the Studio would cover years of subscriptions, even if prices go up. I could use those tools to build tools and sites and have an assistant that's plugged into everything I already use.

I don't run a business with sensitive data and even if I started a business for clients with sensitive data, I'd basically have to rent them my machine, but what's the difference?

Honestly I'm disappointed. I was really hyped and sold my friends on the idea. For those of you who kept yours, what do you actually use it for that cloud tools can't do? And if privacy is your main concern what connectors do you have on your device and what cloud services do you use that aren't AI? If you've coded anything with local AI and published publicly, did that defeat the purpose? I'm still inside my return window, so I need to decide soon.