> Runs on a compatible personal laptop, such as a MacBook Pro

I'm curious, do normal people (so not HN professional developers or entrepreneurs) have that, as actually personal device (not from their tech company)?

I imagine some might have but I feel, and that's me so I'm asking the broader community here, that the average PC user has at best a gaming rig, but that's already a minority, and a lot more often a low end laptop with 16GB of normal RAM, not unified or VRAM. Am I out of touch?

My dev machine is an off the shelf Acer aspire laptop that I bought used, it comes with a 4GB RAM, I also added 4GB of swap memory. I use it to develop fullstack applications for servers, browsers and android. My stack is Rust, Javascript, Dart/Flutter, Postgresql and running Debian 13.

It works great, I mainly use 2 applications , Firefox and urxvt, using emacs -nw to write code, no LSP or code completion because they use too much RAM. I also use i3wm which very lightweight.

The only issue with it is that some keys on the keyboard don't work, so I mapped them to different keys, for example ctrl is mapped to caps lock, 0 is mapped to 3 on the numpad, enter is mapped to right shift etc. Because of this I can't type on other peoples computers, I would need to run my xmodmap script before I do that.

no.

It was SO HARD to convince my sister to spend that 100€ more for 16 GB of ram.

My personal laptop is a fairly decent one, still with 16GB of soldered ram.

Just got approved a new laptop for work. 4k for 64GB of RAM and high end CPU. 1.5y ago that would have been 2.5k, only macs would have been that expensive

I think the trajectory is more important than the snapshot in time. A year or two ago if you wanted to run things locally you were either running toy models, or somehow had a super-computing cluster. Now it's just high end 'normal' hardware. At current trends, we'll be running frontiers on a plain old computer within a few years.

All the snapshot does is set a pricepoint. Most 'normal' people I've talked to about LLMs have expressed some concerns about privacy/control from LLM cloud companies. So this is the cost it takes to opt out - actually substantially less since a 4090 is also enough to run Qwen 3.8. MSRP there is $1600. Retail price is a bit higher but trending down quickly. Once this bubble pops, this sort of hardware will probably be available on the cheap.

Anyhow, so yeah - a 'normal' person isn't going to have a $15k laptop or a $1600 video card (that retails upwards of $2k realistically) because they had no reason to. Now they do. Of course in a year or two, those prices will likely have plummeted precipitously, so perhaps they still have no reason unless they're just particularly impatient.

I allways use my own devices. Most universities allow to run/use your own devices. I run a m2 with 96gb.

> do normal people (so not HN professional developers or entrepreneurs) have that, as actually personal device (not from their tech company)?

I guess I'm far from the norm, as I have a Macbook Pro privately. I personally don't have 30+ GB of ram, though I'm sure the next one will have that.

However, I doubt that 'normal people' are even the target market for this. 'Normal people' don't care about their models running in the cloud. They want their voice assistant to be somewhat useful when there's no internet and we don't need 145B models for that.

So I think that I and people like me, often caller prosumers, are the target for these type of things. Some people buy €5k camera lenses for their hobby, others buy €5k laptops.

I think that only for showoff.

Those weighting value/price for the use case they are having the Pro is an overkill for most in the population. I have a good but still medium performance laptop personally as I use it for learning experimentation (and fun, which is not independent from the two former), but I did not push such for my wife. For her even the entry level Mac is an overkill. Be both recognise that. For those thinking like us the MacBook Neo was a good move from Apple.

Said that, this was before personal AI assistants. Now, for privacy reasons, I might push for a more capable laptop for her too (if I was sure I could set up a reliable config locally. I did not dig into that enough to make sure, but I'd do if it was an issue today).