I had a Strix Halo laptop with 128GB which unfortunately died last week. I paid 2800 euro for it. If I buy the same machine today, the sticker price is 7899.

The device was not perfect by any means, but the ability to run fairly large models is some kind of magic.

I was hoping to buy a competent local model machine later this year but given the prices I’m shelving that for now. Especially because the frontier models are very cheap relative to the cost of building my own setup. Especially because AI specialised hardware and processors are improving very fast, meaning hardware we buy now will become obsolete for this use case much faster than for traditional computer use cases.

In 1-3 years the hardware crunch will be over, local distilled models will provide Opus 4.8 like intelligence, and the hardware will exist to provide usable performance.

Last year you could buy a AI Max 395+ with 128G for 2.5k, now it's almost $4k.

Or maybe you're right, I originally remembered 2k as well. I wanted to wait for the AI Max 395+ upgrade of my laptop, and now it makes no sense to upgrade.

What's the advantage of ds4 over llama.cpp, esp if down the line they upstream his forked kernels?

>The biggest problem is all the tech companies making consumer hardware completely unaffordable, and I don't think this is accidental. Look at Micron's profits and share price lately...

You realize "tech companies" isn't a monolith? Micron charging inflated prices doesn't magically benefit OpenAI. The "high prices keep out competitors" theory doesn't make much sense either. It's like saying Dennys benefits from higher egg prices because it makes cooking eggs at home more expensive.