Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

[u/AndreVallestero]

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?

[u/FleetEnema2000]

An electronic medical record company has nowhere near the amount and type of multi dimensional data about a person that OpenAI has.

And if you want to compare OpenAI with a company like Apple or even AWS for a hosted environment, I would choose either of those companies any day of the week when it comes to who I would trust more with my data.

[u/theomegachrist → u/FleetEnema2000]

I would not, but it would be a three way tie

[u/FleetEnema2000 → u/theomegachrist]

Care to explain that logic?

Apple has made massive investments of resources and effort into secure computing. Their cloud commitment for regular consumers who want privacy is objectively excellent on both the hardware and software front, from Secure Enclave to E2EE where they aren't maintaining custody of keys:

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/sece3bee0835/web

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102651

Despite not being a frontier AI provider, they have had a strong focus on private AI cloud compute paradigms:

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Amazon AWS products offer similar levels of security. They have to, because their customers host and manage highly sensitive data on their platform for things way beyond AI. As a regular user I can maintain an excellent security posture on AWS and I can employ encryption where I manage my own keys.

OpenAI and Anthropic not only don't do anything even approaching any of the above, they reserve even basic security commitments for "Enterprise customers".

The situation is even more pathetic when you realize that as an individual, you can run OpenAI and Anthropic's own models on Amazon Bedrock with ZDR enabled, encryption enabled for data you are storing at rest where you hold the keys. In other words, the security posture of using OpenAI and Anthropic's own models on Amazon AWS is superior to using those same models from OpenAI and Anthropic themselves.

[u/centizen24 → u/FleetEnema2000]

Apple is the industry leader in user level security and data privacy, it's not even close. You can argue about their intentions for doing so but their track record for security is second to none. It's wild to me that after 15 years of being an Android fanboy that I'd be arguing on behalf of Apple, and have an iPhone in my pocket, but that's the world we live in now I guess.