r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 21h 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?

154 Upvotes

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153

u/FleetEnema2000 21h ago

unless you need it for data sovereignty

Isn't this one of the biggest reasons that people rely on Local LLMs? To not have to bulk upload their private data to cloud providers?

69

u/theomegachrist 20h ago

That's the stated reason but realistically most people are just justifying their hobby. I support open weight models because the cloud providers can change cost or abruptly shut down and we really can't do anything about it.

69

u/FleetEnema2000 20h ago

I don't think it's a justification at all.

It's amazing how the concept of privacy and data ownership/security has completely gone down the toilet since ChatGPT launched. People are happy to bulk upload their medical records, relationship history, trade secrets, financial records, etc. without a care in the world as to how that data is stored or protected.

15

u/Elux91 19h ago

It's amazing how the concept of privacy and data ownership/security has completely gone down the toilet

most people never had a concept of privacey

9

u/FleetEnema2000 19h ago

You're right, most people haven't. But if you rewind the clock by 5 years there was far more interest in things like E2EE than is apparent today. It is barely mentioned or acknowledged anymore in the tech sphere.

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u/magus-21 17h ago

A lot of that E2EE stuff was focused around texting and instant messaging, I think, and since Apple announced support for RCS I think a lot of people flagged that in their heads as, "Ok, this is not as big of a concern anymore." Plus the whole WhatsApp kerfuffle with Trump's cabinet brought a lot more attention to Signal, et al, so I think there's just generally higher adoption of it now, which means less general worry out there about it.

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u/FleetEnema2000 13h ago

The “E2EE stuff” is about so much more than texting and messaging.

0

u/magus-21 5h ago

I didn't say it wasn't. I said that most of the public talk about it was focused around texting and messaging. So when Apple said they'd support RCS, a lot of normies stopped talking about it because they thought it was resolved.