If you're a professional that's confident in a positive return on the investment (optimal or not), or just a hobbyist with the luxury budget for a "shop" that cost is well within norms.
That's not everybody, of course, but it's not some inconceivable fantasy. A lot of people in the tech community here on HN, specifically, end up with pretty high discretionary budgets that they pour into stuff like this.
Most hobbyists and many professionals could end up far ahead financially by leveraging makerspaces, tool rentals, and co-op shops or even by hiring out a professional to prep certain intermediates for them, but they get psychological value -- as well as flexibility, reliability, and resale opportunity -- from having their own well-outfitted shop.
And they can afford that premium, so they do. At the scale of individuals and small shops, not everything that matters gets captured in financial models.
Aside, physical tools tend to be financially advantageous to own if you're going to use them a lot. Even if the owner were targeting 0 profit, they'd have to charge more to factor in the cost of dealing with customers and increased risk of wear/damage by users who don't care as much.
Most come with huge privacy concerns, total costs and availability are impossible to forecast very far out, and the specific behavior of frontier models in particular is not something anybody can rely on as those are subscription products that are subject behavior on their publisher's whims (whether from changing system prompts, new "safeguards", retired models, forced "updates", new regulations, etc).
It's quite hard to put a price on all that, and as more people find local models productive enough or develop curiosity to explore models, training, or harness-crafting in their own ways, the marginal cost of buying some shop hardware just sort of disappears into the budget noise for plenty enough people.
Still cheaper than a new Mac. Maybe not cheaper than a used one.
Top 10% of global earners (~800M people) can afford a $2,000 device without major financial strain.
Top 25% (~2B people) could afford it with some budget adjustments.
Bottom 50% (~4B people) would find it prohibitively expensive.
So for a SV top income, maybe that might look more like the weekly pet brushing budget, but for most people out there this is not that much of a no-brainer.
Besides those with effectively unlimited budgets for their personal compute, local models are still a long ways off.
Though, that shouldn't be conflated with the value of open-source models, which can be used by cloud providers to significantly reduce cost of intelligence.
There are segments, everything from "Average person in world" to "Average creative professional using computers for work" and more on HN, with a wide range of costs for the hardware. HN probably skews towards the latter rather than the former, probably sitting with enterprise hardware next to them basically for fun, hard to make wider conclusions from what people here have or not.
It's just for gaming and AI now. Maybe not even gaming as much anymore.
Consider the perspective of someone who has a practically unlimited budget for PCs, doesn't game much anymore, and doesn't need AI to do their job. It's just part of getting older, and there are plenty of people in their late 30s and older on here.