Yes, today is not a great time to purchase hardware.

When I bought, I paid $850 a piece. And I needed one anyways for the gaming I was going to do.

My guess is the next good time to buy is going to be 24-36 months from now, depending on how the AI bubble goes.

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I'll add to this, I personally don't like Apple hardware (not so much related to the hardware as their company philosophy) but their machines with unified memory (or AMDs latest unified memory offerings) get pretty equivalent speeds to my 3090s, and are probably a much better modern entrypoint to local llms.

There's a reason the joke is that Silicon Valley software devs bought up all the Mac minis for OpenClaw.

You can get a 48gb unified RAM M4 pro mac mini for ~2k. If you're not going to do much else with the machine, it's what I'd pick as my budget inference device right now. Spend a year of claude now, get ~150tok/s for the next decade (plus) for ~free.

If you want more capable and are willing to spend a little more, go with the newer Ryzen AI Max+ 395 machines.

You'll spend less on power too.

My last suggestion would be to go buy an RTX3090 at this point. You can do a lot better for a lot cheaper.

If you're willing to go the AMD route, the AMD Radeon Pro R9700 definitely looks interesting for the price compared to NVidia.