The full-amortization framing is doing a lot of work here. I bought my laptop because I needed a laptop, not as an inference box, and running a model on it is incidental to that. Once the hardware is sunk for other reasons, the only cost left is electricity plus whatever depreciation you accelerate by hammering the SoC, which the post actually acknowledges in one parenthetical before allocating the full $4299 to tokens anyway.

Also nobody I know picks local over OpenRouter on price. They pick it for offline, for data not leaving the machine, for no rate limits, for not having a provider go down mid-task. If $/Mtok is the only axis, sure, cloud wins.

In practice the pattern I see is leaving a small model running on easy background tasks while using the laptop normally, not a dedicated inference box hammered flat out for 5 years.