I am not getting your point. Are you saying I should be spending 2y of savings (20k) to get rid of the 3rd party dependency, and if I don't, it is merely convenience? And are you saying I should buy another lock-in system (an Apple device) in exchange?

Cost of doing business. A contractor will need to buy a truck. A programmer would need to rent hardware. The cost of hardware would go down over time, of course.

The point is with open weight models that are SOTA, this isn’t techno feudalism as some people here seem to claim.