alt Hacker NewsThe 128GB M5 Max MBP I ordered at launch was $7049 and is now $9849 for the same configuration, that's nearly a 30% price increase and more than $2000 bump. During the same time from launch to now, I have seen local LLMs get significantly better, to the point that I wish more people had hardware like this to be able to localize their workloads. I can't help but think society is moving in the wrong direction with this technology by further centralizing in hyperscalars and damaging the hardware market to make strong general purpose computing even more difficult for individuals to obtain, when the right direction would be democratization of both the hardware and the software to allow most workloads to be run locally.
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I had one in my cart last night. It seems far less appealing today.
There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
Related, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...
I really think this is a coordinated effort to restrict computing capacity for individuals and force adoption of centralized AI - I think there already is evidence of this from the moves OpenAI had made to lock up memory and gpu markets.