I get tempted to buy a couple of these, but I just feel like the amortization doesn’t make sense yet. Surely in the next few years this will be orders of magnitude cheaper.

Before committing to purchasing two of these, you should look at the true speeds that few people post. Not just the "it works". We're at a point where we can run these very large models "at home", and it is great! But true usage is now with very large contexts, both in prompt processing, and token generations. Whatever speeds these models get at "0" context is very different than what they get at "useful" context, especially in coding and such.

I don’t think it will ever make sense; you can buy so much cloud based usage for this type of price.

From my perspective, the biggest problem is that I am just not going to be using it 24/7. Which means I’m not getting nearly as much value out of it as the cloud based vendors do from their hardware.

Last but not least, if I want to run queries against open source models, I prefer to use a provider like Groq or Cerebras as it’s extremely convenient to have the query results nearly instantly.

The only reason why you run local models is for privacy, never for cost. Or even latency.

Hopefully the next time it’s updated, it should ship with some variant of the M5.

Maybe wait until RAM prices have normalized again.

This is a weird line of thinking. Here's a question. If you buy one of these and figure out how to use it to make $100k in 3 months, would that be good? When you run a local model, you shouldn't compare it to to cost of using an API. The value lies in how you use it. Let's forget bout making money. Let's just say you have weird fetish and like to have dirty sexy conversation with your LLM. How much would you pay for your data not to be leaked and for the world to see your chat? Perhaps having your own private LLM makes it all worth it. If you have nothing special going then by all means use APIs, but if you feel/know your input it special, then yeah, go private.