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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

An Apple M1 is decent enough for LMs. My friend wondered why I got so excited about it when it came out five years ago. It wasn't that it was particularly powerful - it's decent. What it did was to set a new bar for "low end".

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A new Mac is easily starting around $1k and quickly goes up from there if you want a storage or RAM upgrade, especially for enough memory to really run some local models. Insane that a $1,000 computer is called "decent" and "low end". My daily driver personal laptop brand new was $300.

That's fun to hear given that low end laptops are now $800, mid range is like $1.5k and upper end is $3k+ even for non-Apple vendors. Inflation makes fools of us all.

Low end laptops can still easily be found for far less than $800.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/676305/acer-aspire-3-a31...

The first IBM PC in 1981 cost $1,565, which is comparable to $5,500 after inflation.

An M1 Mac is about 5 years old at this point and can be had for far less than a grand.

A brand new Mac Mini M4 is only $499.

Ah, I was focusing on the laptops, my bad. But still its more than $499. Just looked on the Apple store website, Mac Mini M4 starting at $599 (not $499), with only 256GB of storage.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/m4

microcenter routinely sells that system for $450.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/688173/Mac_mini_MU9D3LL-...

You're right - memory size and then bandwidth is imperative for LLMs. Apple currently lacks great memory bandwidth with their unified memory. But it's not a bad option if you can find one for a good price. The prices for new are just bonkers.

Of course it depends on what you consider "low end" - it's relative to your expectations. I have a G4 TiBook, the definition of a high-end laptop, by 2002 standards. If you consider a $300 laptop a good daily driver, I'll one-up you with this: <https://www.chrisfenton.com/diy-laptop-v2/>

My $300 laptop is a few years old. It has a Ryzen 3 3200U CPU, it has a 14" 1080p display, backlit keyboard. It came with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I upgraded to 16GB from RAM acquired by a dumpster dive and a 256GB SSD for like $10 on clearance at Microcenter. I upgraded the WiFi to an Intel AX210 6e for about another $10 off Amazon. It gets 6-8 hours of battery life doing browsing and texting editing kind of workloads.

The only thing that is itching me to get a new machine is it needs a 19V power supply. Luckily it's a pretty common barrel size, I already had several power cables laying around that work just fine. I'd prefer to just have all my portable devices to run off USB-C though.

I know I speak for everyone that your dumpster laptop is very impressive, give yourself a big pat on the back. You deserve it.

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