alt Hacker NewsMmmm, nope if you do the smart thing. MacBook M5 max 128gb is a premium laptop at 6k, but with it you can do many things and is your good main driver for the day. Then, it can also run DeepSeek V4 flash and perform non trivial tasks locally, without censorship or limitations, even without an internet connection and on very privacy sensitive data. That's a good deal. If you buy 25k for a dual Mac Studio 512gb to abandon OpenAI and company you are going to be disappointed by both performance and cost.
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The smart thing is to get a ~48gb MacBook and use it as your daily driver, and then budget ~$800/year for AI subscriptions or tokens and you'll end up at the same price.
I say, as the author of the blog post, writing this on a MacBook M5 max 128gb..
Yea my m4 max with 128gb has ended up making a lot of sense for me. I do video editing, I train ml models, I run large open AI models, I do 3d modeling, rendering and cad work. I never do all of this 100% of the time, I’ll setup a ml training to run over night and check results in the morning, during work I’ll set it up as a server and run local models, on my own time I’ll edit video and work on 3d modeling. It’s an incredibly versatile machine - and all of this is done while keeping your data on your device and giving you full control over your workflows.