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The smart thing is to get a ~48gb MacBook and use it as your daily driver, and then budget ~$800/year for AI subscriptions or tokens and you'll end up at the same price.

I say, as the author of the blog post, writing this on a MacBook M5 max 128gb..

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I agree with you, practically. But there is another angle of the story: for instance models are starting to be useless to do security stuff, since they are every day more censored. Also prices skyrocketed in the latest months, what will happen later? A few months ago I was shocked people resisted to spend 20$/month to get basically free frontier models, and I warned we were headed to house monthly rent figures in the future as AI becomes more and more required to do work. So indeed what you say is absolutely true now (but $800/year is not accurate: you need 20x accounts to do real work in my experience, so $200 * 12 = 2400$/year). But if you have a 128GB MacBook, that no longer looks so costly compared to 2400$/year of frontier models, you can experience uncensored LLMs, a quick thing that always works to do low-value work like TLDR this blog post for me, or what's wrong in this function? Or could you explain me this API? And for this kind of work, DeepSeek v4 Flash looks basically frontier. So if you look at things in perspective, they could have a different shape.

"starting to be useless to do security stuff, since they are every day more censored"

I have not observed this at all, If anything the big 3 are getting both better and more helpful in this area. And if you pass the security checks Antropic will give you Limited access to Mythos.

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