The M3 Ultra was a lot cheaper for most of its lifetime, and really the main reason for buying it is if you want a lot of unified RAM, to run bigger models than 27B models.

The new M5 Ultra should deliver ~50% faster token generation (1.2TB/s mem bandwidth); and extrapolating from my M5 Max (since the M5 Ultra is literally just 2x Maxes), probably ~3x faster PP.

But I don't think it's fair to look at this only from monetary ROI vs API. With local models, you get privacy and ownership.

I do not trust _any_ API provider with my most personal information; such as for example, all my messages, emails, daily journals spanning a decade+, all my photos and videos, etc. So it unlocks new use cases that I simply don't feel comfortable with via API.

And a personal assistant with ALL my context and data, locally, has been incredibly useful for me :) Zero outages either, zero "overloaded", etc. Nearly-zero refusals too (I don't run abliterated models; thinking prefill has worked for anything I've wanted to do)