| ▲ | _doctor_love 4 hours ago |
| "Just get a 64GB Mac with 1TB of storage!" LOL - some of us have a budget |
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| ▲ | swatcoder 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Sure, but it's also not really out of scale with the cost of a shop tool in other trades. If you're a professional that's confident in a positive return on the investment (optimal or not), or just a hobbyist with the luxury budget for a "shop" that cost is well within norms. That's not everybody, of course, but it's not some inconceivable fantasy. A lot of people in the tech community here on HN, specifically, end up with pretty high discretionary budgets that they pour into stuff like this. |
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| ▲ | frollogaston an hour ago | parent [-] | | But you can get that return from a paid service too, in fact it'll be better. So just comparing costs, what's the annualized ROI on the Mac Studio assuming it means you avoid paying $240/y for Claude? Cause I can always set aside the Mac's price in some investments and pay for Claude out of that. | | |
| ▲ | swatcoder 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Same with many and their shop tools in other trades. Most hobbyists and many professionals could end up far ahead financially by leveraging makerspaces, tool rentals, and co-op shops or even by hiring out a professional to prep certain intermediates for them, but they get psychological value -- as well as flexibility, reliability, and resale opportunity -- from having their own well-outfitted shop. And they can afford that premium, so they do. At the scale of individuals and small shops, not everything that matters gets captured in financial models. | | |
| ▲ | frollogaston 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but the local model doesn't have those advantages for the coding use cases, at least not yet. In theory you could post-train one on your codebase or something, but nobody cares to do that when any vanilla coding agent service can read and understand the whole thing better than a locally tuned free model. I was already being very generous towards the Mac in pretending it does the same thing as the paid service. Aside, physical tools tend to be financially advantageous to own if you're going to use them a lot. Even if the owner were targeting 0 profit, they'd have to charge more to factor in the cost of dealing with customers and increased risk of wear/damage by users who don't care as much. | | |
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| ▲ | amalcon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A Strix Halo with similar RAM is considerably cheaper. Still not cheap, mind, but performance is OK (not great) and it will run more or less the same models. |
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| ▲ | AbsurdCensor 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | At least for me, it's been pretty great, but I bought my system when it was $1800, now looks like the same system is $2700 and out of stock. I still haven't quite been able to run 120B parameter models under Windows, but for Qwen Coder 30B, it works pretty darn well for my at home needs. | | |
| ▲ | amalcon 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, they have gone up a lot since I bought mine too. I did get Qwen3.5-122b running on all-GPU (on a 128GB machine) under a minimal Arch Linux setup (I do my GUI work on a much cheaper box). It worked, but Qwen3.6-35b is performing almost as well and a lot faster. Still cheaper than a new Mac. Maybe not cheaper than a used one. | | |
| ▲ | AbsurdCensor an hour ago | parent [-] | | I've certainly thought about just moving the box to Linux, but it took far to long personally to get everything running under AMD and it works 'well enough' that I don't want to make the switch. I tried playing with GAIA on it, felt a bit limited, and now have Hermes up and running, and that seems to work quite well. All the tools are changing so quickly, it's sometimes difficult to settle in on 'what's best', so I certainly can understand folks that just want to pay for a AI subscription and be done with it. |
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| ▲ | techscruggs 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He is using a 2022 M2, which you can get that for about $2k used. That is beyond reasonable. |
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| ▲ | Shekelphile 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | She | |
| ▲ | psychoslave 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Global Affordability Estimate: Top 10% of global earners (~800M people) can afford a $2,000 device without major financial strain. Top 25% (~2B people) could afford it with some budget adjustments. Bottom 50% (~4B people) would find it prohibitively expensive. So for a SV top income, maybe that might look more like the weekly pet brushing budget, but for most people out there this is not that much of a no-brainer. | | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | frollogaston 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bottom 50% aren't paying for Claude either, probably also don't own PCs or write code | |
| ▲ | disgruntledphd2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The maths changes if you're working for yourself. Because I live in Europe, I've ended up working as a contractor due to the lack of a legal entity in my country. While that mostly sucked for a bunch of reasons, I was able to get a 64Gb Mac M2 a few years back with approximately a 52% discount, which was kinda nice. | | |
| ▲ | weego 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you're working for yourself paying monthly is exactly the same as amortising an asset. Personally I'd rather my business just pay $100 a month than have to deal with additional hardware and software maintenance while using a depreciating asset that is break-even after 3-5 years depending on the spec. |
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| ▲ | richwater 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, because the bottom 50%, mostly impoverished or near impoverished folks were spending money on Claude Code subscriptions instead /s |
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| ▲ | p-e-w 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No need. You can run the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 MoE models with as little as 12 GB of VRAM at 30-40 tps (Q4/Q5), and they both blow GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 out of the water. |
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| ▲ | tjwebbnorfolk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| AI and budgets don't mix well at the moment |
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| ▲ | themythfable 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average. Besides those with effectively unlimited budgets for their personal compute, local models are still a long ways off. Though, that shouldn't be conflated with the value of open-source models, which can be used by cloud providers to significantly reduce cost of intelligence. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average. There are segments, everything from "Average person in world" to "Average creative professional using computers for work" and more on HN, with a wide range of costs for the hardware. HN probably skews towards the latter rather than the former, probably sitting with enterprise hardware next to them basically for fun, hard to make wider conclusions from what people here have or not. | |
| ▲ | sublinear 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If we define "typical" as the median HN budget, it's probably about the same as yours. Maybe the answer would have been different 10 or 20 years ago, but the era of truly needing a big budget PC has been over for a while. It's just for gaming and AI now. Maybe not even gaming as much anymore. Consider the perspective of someone who has a practically unlimited budget for PCs, doesn't game much anymore, and doesn't need AI to do their job. It's just part of getting older, and there are plenty of people in their late 30s and older on here. |
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| ▲ | anarticle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Pros buy their own tools. This is why working for yourself is better than working for a corpo, you get to choose your weapon. |
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| ▲ | dofm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dead] |
