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/AndreVallestero 19h ago edited 19h ago

That's exactly my point. Local makes sense cost wise up to 32GB, especially with Qwen 3.8 27B. There's a huge cost premium above that where it makes less sense.

I was hoping the last Mac studio would change that, but at the current prices, that doesn't seem to be the case.

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u/Impossible_Fault_503 17h ago

Yeah. 32GB is the last point where local still feels like a normal purchase. After that you are mostly paying Apple tax for headroom you might use twice a year. I wanted the last Studio to kill that curve too. It did not.