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.

A Strix Halo with similar RAM is considerably cheaper. Still not cheap, mind, but performance is OK (not great) and it will run more or less the same models.

He is using a 2022 M2, which you can get that for about $2k used. That is beyond reasonable.

No need. You can run the Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 MoE models with as little as 12 GB of VRAM at 30-40 tps (Q4/Q5), and they both blow GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 out of the water.

AI and budgets don't mix well at the moment

Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average.

Besides those with effectively unlimited budgets for their personal compute, local models are still a long ways off.

Though, that shouldn't be conflated with the value of open-source models, which can be used by cloud providers to significantly reduce cost of intelligence.

Pros buy their own tools. This is why working for yourself is better than working for a corpo, you get to choose your weapon.

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