But the people who want to do local inference are putting some amount of value on privacy that’s not captured by the raw monetary value so just comparing the price is somewhat beside the point, it’s also true that, if you have eg a Mac and you use that as your main computing device then you would have spent money on it anyway, so you can’t even really compare its value to spend on something that’s not general purpose.

That's a lot of assumptions. I think there are also people buying new hardware specifically for this purpose, and their motivation to do it is thinking it will be cheaper in the long run. Privacy is not necessarily the motivation.

My overall opinion is that the smart thing is not to upgrade to the maximum memory for AI purposes. It's worth quantifying how much extra we pay for privacy.

I replied to a comment asking why the article exists.

As for privacy, I'm sure there are many people that are not so interested in that aspect.