I'm very interested in Local LLMs but the cheapest Mac Studio right now is more expensive than 8 years of a Claude Code Pro subscription, and incomparably slower/less capable. If I get bored with it, I will have a piece of unused hardware and a couple grand less in my bank account.
My partner on the otherhand has an M3 Max 64GB which I've had way more success with. Setting up opencode and doing a tiny spec-driven Rust project and watching it kiiinda work was extraordinarily exciting!
...but all the AMD 395+ machines I can find are even more expensive than the aforementioned cheapest Mac Studio. Mac Studio starts at $2,000 (only 32GB), AMD 395+ 128GB machines seem to start at $3,000 from what I can see.
i do not know if theres a smaller model with same capability, but model size and context window at 128 seems like a sweet spot.
token speed really isnt a bother because im either just multitasking or working on the filling in the missing details.
regardless, i think comparing first VRAM sizes w/target model then speed for your cost efficiency. plus, a healthy skepticism of mac hardware costs.
And with a Claude or GPT $20 Subscription, i can do other fun things too like using it for real things (emails) or image generation.
A Mac Studio or AMD395 is neither of it. And its not just a basic setup either. I need to buy it, configure it, put it somewhere. That alone is a grand and more + a whole weekend.
This means oyu may be opinionated today on something you will not have tomorrow, 6 months, a year. All that work flow you salivate over can be ripped away.
If you're fine with that, and you've "escaped the permanent underclass" congrats, this opinion is not for you.
It's actually really cool to have it work on some internal tooling and stuff while I work on my primary projects.
I'm surprised how easy it is to setup and that it can handle modestly complex planning and development flows.