They are perfectly fine for certain people. I can run Qwen-2.5-coder 14B on my M2 Max MacBook Pro with 32gb at ~16 tok/sec. At least in my circle, people are budget conscious and would prefer using existing devices rather than pay for subscriptions where possible.

And we know why they won't ship NVLink anymore on prosumer GPUs: they control almost the entire segment and why give more away for free? Good for the company and investors, bad for us consumers.