It pays for itself very quickly if you do 24/7 generation. Use an AI agent that orchestrates other agents working on many things at once constantly. If speed is a factor, you'd not buy a Macbook, you'd buy dual RTX 3090s. About the same price, but at least 6x faster than M5 Max. The benefit of constant generation is you can do a lot more research, coding sub-agents, experiments, etc in parallel when you're not "at work". You end up getting a lot more work done than if you only sit there babysitting sessions.