It can be more than "slightly", particularly if the model you're interested in (or will be interested in in 6 months) doesn't fit on the mac studio. You also need to account for eg storing 10TB of random checkpoints, load time when experimenting, and so on. When you start actually needing throughput these are all capability gaps in practical use, not just x% benchmark differences.

If you just want to run Qwen 3.8 27B and Deepseek v4 Flash in perpetuity and that's it, there are a lot of solutions that will work and this is a fairly user friendly one.

A 3x price difference means you can get 3 256GB mac studios which you can connect through thunderbolt and with RDMA a total of 768GB ram with compute/memory bandwidth scaling basically linearly (with a small overhead cost).

You can find model variants to scale up to whatever capacity you have. Queen has models that just barely fit in 256gb, I ran them… okay… on my Studio.