If Qwen 3 Coder were available as a PCI card I could just slot into my desktop, and the software on the system could recognize the card and still work with other cards should I decide I later want to upgrade to Qwen 5 or whatever, and at a three figure price point, I imagine it would do quite well.

The comparison I've seen elsewhere is the old console systems with separate cartridges for games... I wouldn't want to be regularly swapping them, but if they came out in a form factor that didn't require me to shell out multiple-4 digit figures in upgrades just to use the next model, it'd easily be worth it for me.

I've already got a home lab, and it's specced to last, minus the GPU. I picked up a separate system for local llm experimentation, but I'm not likely to be upgrading it again. The value add is incredibly small compared to the cost. The real benefits are data privacy and never worrying about rate limits, and there's a price point beyond which an incremental improvement to the model doesn't justify upgrading the system.