A 128GiB MacBook Pro in Canada is what, north of CAD $11k after tax? That’s around USD $7k. At $20/month for a cloud AI subscription, you’re looking at almost 30 years of service for the same money.

How long do people realistically expect a laptop to stay competitive with SOTA local models? Especially in a space where model sizes, context windows, and inference requirements keep moving every year.

And even if the hardware lasts, the local experience usually doesn’t. A heavily quantized local model running at tolerable speeds on consumer hardware is still nowhere near frontier hosted models in reasoning, coding, multimodal capability, tool use, or reliability.

The economics just don’t make sense to me unless you specifically need offline inference, privacy guarantees, or low latency for a niche workflow. Otherwise you’re tying up $10k upfront to run an approximation of what you can already access through a subscription that continuously improves over time.

You could literally put the difference into index funds and probably cover the subscription indefinitely from the returns alone, even accounting for gradual price increases.

But what if you were going to buy a laptop anyway? Obviously you can't do anything with less than 64 GBytes these days, so the question is just whether you go for the jump to 128.

In the UK, it's currently an extra £800 to get a 128 GB vs the 64 GB equivalent. So that's more like 3 years of Claude - I think? - assuming current prices stay the same.

Or: you might just feel like £800 isn't an unjustifiable amount of money (one way or another), and tick the box, on the basis that it might just work out. As the saying goes, in for 459,900 pennies, in for £5,399...

You are assuming I'd only get it for that. That would probably just be the straw that broke the camels back, but I'm already thinking about a purchase even if that doesn't work out.

You have to use the item a lot, to the point where you'd be exceeding subs a lot

This is one of the best takedowns of local models I've ever seen.

I just hate paying money for cloud subscriptions, and work has given me a decent laptop