It’s a mistake to generalize from the HN population.

Most people don’t care about privacy (see: success of Facebook and TikTok). Most people don’t care about subscriptions (see: cable TV, Netflix).

There may be a niche market for a local inference device that costs $1000 and has to be replaced every year or two during the early days of AI, but it’s not a market with decent ROI for Apple.

An iPhone, Macbook, etc all cost in the $1000 range.

There was a post about the new iphone using A19, which includes a feature that makes local inference much easier.

If that makes it to M5, I think the local inference case continues to grow with each M processor.