Currently the barrier to entry for local models is about $2500. Funny thing is $2500 is about the amount my parents paid for a 166 MHZ machine in 1995.

I remember my Dad buying a 386 25MHz a few years earlier for a similar amount.

In 1984 he bought a TRS-80 for almost a thousand dollars. 32kB RAM, around 1 MHz 8 bit CPU.

I bought a Pentium 90 in the late 90's for several thousand dollars. It had the FDIV bug in it.

After experiencing a lifetime of high depreciation in electronics, I'm extremely price sensitive when buying it. I feel that if I wait a few years everything will become much cheaper. Maybe that's not the case with the slow down in Moore's law and the AI datacenter build out.

The top local mode in this benchmark is Qwen3.5-9B (Q4_K_M), which is not a big model.

9B = 9 billion parameters. Q4_K_M is the quantization which will come in somewhere around 4.5 bits per weight.

It will run well on a $500 Mac Mini.

My first 'real' machine was a Price Club (now Costco) 386sx for $3800 in late '89, which would be nearly $10k adjusted for inflation. 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, 40 MB hard disk.

That was bargain basement for that era. IBMs, Compaqs and the like were ~$5k similarly configured, and the first 486s were in the $7-9k area.

Entry level is actually MAC MINI 16GB at <$499, I have models running on M2 MINI 16GB, it's working with small models.

This is very false. My first system was a 3060 which you can buy new for about $300 or used for about $200. If you already have an existing system you can use it, else you can pick up a used PC for about $150. Entry is about $500.

The used model is 9B even with a big context you can easily run it on 16GB. You don't need a $2500 machine for it.