Why is there a desire to have this stuff on the edge on the engineers lap instead of just building some arbitrarily scalable cluster for I'm guessing cheaper than apple's usual premium? Habitual practice from the engineers who would compile on the device getting hot in their lap? Lack of widespread hpc experience compared to running docker?

Many users would prefer to use a Sonnet-level (or better) LLM without sharing their data with others.

And with a device like this, you pay one single time to buy the product and then never have to think about paying for tokens ever again. For ordinary users that's silly, but for users or businesses chewing through lots of tokens, this means they can create their own turnkey replacement for "the cloud" where the only cost after purchasing the machine is the electricity to run it (which with these machines is very little). Mix that with the privacy benefits and suddenly it makes a lot of sense.

People don’t want to send all their private company data to the model providers?

Because why not? If you can get unlimited inference with roughly Opus 5.5 intelligence for $10k that easily beats current API pricing. Like not even a question.

Distrust in allowing an unreliable vendor to control the fate of your business?