You could spend 100 a month leasing one of these for three years and get the best of both worlds
replyYou’re still stuck paying for a 3 year contract for deprecating hardware. And the 256gb model which is still not enough is $230 a month. And it runs models 8 months behind frontier
replyYou just described why the datacenter business is hard and as a corollary why space datacenters will not be economically viable.
replyLots of people use the Mac Mini to run the frontier models over night or while traveling. I have a rack in my basement and have thought about throwing one in. You can get a cheaper machine but Apple feels a little more, “rack and forget,” if you have less price sensitivity.
replyMac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.
If it’s purely for experimentation then why not the DGX Spark/GB10? It’s up about 10% from release RRP which is quite good (you might argue it was overpriced then, but prosumer and workstation GPU prices are up 100%). 4TB NVMe is not cheap these days - it’d cost at least $500 for a stick - and you get 128GB at a similar bandwidth to an M5 Pro.
replyNevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.
That does not sound like rack and forget. Just looking at prices it’s also way more expensive.
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