So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.

EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.

M6 Mac mini maxes out at 32GB—if you want 64GB you have to go with the M5 Pro (just priced it out on Apple's store page).

I wish you could drop $20k and get a house! Down payment here store like $100k+ (AUD). So "only" 5~ Max Studios.

Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk

Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable

i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.

I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.

I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.

Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.