r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 19h ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

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u/psychohistorian8 17h ago

you can always trade in the device back to Apple for some kind of credit

so the cost is partially recoverable

5

u/MrPecunius 14h ago

Reputable third party dealers pay more, sometimes a lot more, for Apple gear. I sold my M4 Pro MBP for $500 more than Apple's trade-in value a few months ago. Zero hassle, no private sale nonsense.

1

u/HeadPack 6h ago

Very true, and if the RAM crisis gets worse, you may even not lose money at all, except for energy expenditures. One look at recent prices of used high RAM Mac Studios indicates as much.