> I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was.

Well, the hardware remains the same but local models get better and more efficient, so I don't think there is much difference between paying 5k for online models over 5 years vs getting a laptop (and well, you'll need a laptop anyway, so why not just get a good enough one to run local models in the first place?).

If you have inference running on this new 128GB RAM Mac, wouldn't you still need another separate machine to do the manual work (like running IDE, browsers, toolchains, builders/bundlers etc.)? I can not imagine you will have any meaningful RAM available after LLM models are running.