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yeah, on a 96GB Mac Studio and Gemma+Qwen, it's definitely fully doable. fully doable but not really for coding on 16GB. but svelter models and cheaper (eventually) hardware are coming!

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"cheaper (eventually) hardware" Best case 2-3 years from now. Otherwise it will take a major global recession to get us anywhere near last year's prices.

Macs are expensive hardware, but I'm always seeing people running LLMs on them. Is anyone running on cheaper generic hardware and Linux?

A Mac is cheaper than a high end GPU with the same amount of RAM.

ah, right, so it's about Apple Silicon being fast enough to use instead of a GPU?

They use the GPU but an Apple Silicon GPU has the same high speed access to all the RAM on the machine as the CPU does, rather than having its own walled-off maybe 16 GB VRAM in mainstream gaming GPUs or 24 GB in RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 (MSRP $1999 but in practice $3000-$4000 at the moment). Nvidia A100 (80GB VRAM) apparently cost $15,000 or so.

Not only does Apple's unified memory give the GPU more RAM to use, but it also eliminates copying things between CPU RAM and GPU RAM.

A Mac Mini with 48 GB RAM costs $1799. A Mac Studio with 96 GB RAM is $3999 — until March you could get a Mac Studio with 512 GB RAM for $3999, all of which could be used for your AI model.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/apple-pulls-512-m...

Some are coming up used at silly prices.

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/desktops/a...

NB NZ$44,999 is "only" US$25,772.

i believe you meant something like US$9999 for the 512GB. otherwise, i'm going to feel like QUITE the fool for choosing the 96GB variant at the same price

The referenced article specifically says $4000, but reading it more carefully now that's the UPGRADE price, not the full price of the machine.

Checking also...

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/mac-studio-no-512gb-ram...

... confirms that, but I'm not clear on which config the $4000 upgrade was starting from, but I think it's from the M3 Ultra's standard 96 GB.

Both articles say that previously 256 GB RAM was a $1600 upgrade from 96 GB but "now" is a $2000 upgrade.

Now "now" even 256 GB isn't available and 96 GB is the only option with the M3 Ultra.

M3 Ultra is currently $3999 with 96 GB and 28 core CPU 60 core GPU, or +$1500 with 32 core CPU 80 core GPU. If the base price was the same prior to March then yeah $3999+$1500+$4000 = $9499 would have been the price for a maxed out CPU/GPU/RAM config with a 1 TB disk.

I wasn't looking at Mac Studio prices back then so unfortunately articles such as these are my only clue. I'm still more than happy with my original M1 Mini with 16 GB RAM as I don't work with local LLMs — only on my little NUC-like RISC-V "K3" machine with 32 GB RAM and regular RISC-V cores with 1024 bit vectors as the "NPU", doing around 7 tok/s on 32B models while using 14W of power.

And use less power

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Q4_K_M.gguf spread across few 8-16GB GPUs is cheap as reward points for a comparable Mac if you don't mind heat, noise, and not-blazing-fast generation speeds.

Most ATX cases only has 7 PCIe I/O shields and can't take more than 3x double slot cards, but many gaming systems can take 2x double slot full length 16GB cards, and they should be fine for many purposes. Cooling is most easily done by a squirrel cage fan mounted with a 3D printed bracket at the back.

Cheap parallel action crimping tools for Molex 5556 works too - PCIe 8-pin is NOT 5557, it's differently keyed, so the specifically PCIe intended housings have to be used for cables, if you are crimping your own.

No one is mining crypto anymore, and crypto PSUs are being dumped dirt cheap, should you want a stable bulk 12V supply.

I suspect hosted and local will converge when hardware prices come down and API prices go up. The massive rate of datacenter build out will be unsustainable. Right now the hosted models are massively cheaper than buying the hardware and running it yourself which signals that hosted is very subsidized.

If you don't have that hardware thr math of buying a depreciating computer is challenging if you are satisfied with the $100/month plans ($1200/year). A 96GB Mac Studio is ~$4k. I think if you have the hardware already as a sunk cost then yes it makes sense. But I'm not sure it is worth spending $4k for today's hardware vs waiting for newer hardware in a few years.

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