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 43 minutes 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.

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swatcoder 19 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 11 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.