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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

It's plausible but is the Apple Tax for a 1TB memory machine on top of current memory prices really worth it? I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop with 16GB VRAM back in 2023, it's great but DoA for even quantized LLMs. I can run SLMs and fine tune it but that's it.

We need one of those specialized inference chip startups to succeed and a PC manufacturer willing to bet on them against Nvidia for the local AI to find mass market appeal.

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I recently bought a Mac mini M4 16 GB - mostly to run Immich. I assumed I needed a Linux box. After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax.

> After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option

For Immich, the cheapest option will either be a NAS or a used laptop depending on the amount of data you need, I wouldn't buy a mac for that.

Maybe he wants really fast or large AI models inside immich?

(I just run the defaults on my CPU, works for me)

I'm not sure why you would need large AI models for Immich, the face detection is pretty cheap and will run on 10 year old hardware without a blip.

I think the decision comes primarily on how much data you would like to store for Immich, if you want to go cheaply, a 100 bucks used laptop will do the job, if you have too much data, a NAS will be more suitable (and you are certainly not going to get a mac where you can plug multiple internal hard drives for the price of a NAS)

Not for faces, but the CLIP model for the context search https://docs.immich.app/features/searching/

That needs to be in (v)ram for searches.

That can be yeah but personally I wouldn't pay 3 times the amount you would pay normally just for that feature in particular.

Yeah, me neither. Fast enough for me on CPU.

>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax."

Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.

That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.

It really depends what you factor in as value, because wintel laptops like you described tend to require noise canceling headphones when working on them.

True, can't beat current Apple chips on power efficiency.

RAM upgrade possibility has a downside though - very low RAM bandwidth, which is highly relevant today if you want to run local LLMs

If you're happy with the base model, then Apple has a great value/price ratio, but there's nothing below it and any upgrade is really bad value for the money.

Hmmm, not always. Between at least 1998 and 2005, PCs were just better. Better CPUs.

If you think the apple tax is high you should see the nvidia tax.

> I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop

That's how much many developers currently spend on tokens - every day. Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

>Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

Current high-end Mac Studio with 32-core M3 Ultra chip and 96 GB of memory is $6800, 96GB is not enough to run GLM 5.2 without extreme quantization or stacking HW; but for the sake of discussion let's run quantized version on a single high end Mac Studio.

GLM 5.2 Max plan costs $ 112/m, so it would take ~60 months to recover the costs assuming the machine was bought just for AI. By then the current AI landscape would have changed drastically.

I use local AI on both Linux and Mac every single day, there's freedom, privacy and peace of mind in running the model locally. But I feel cost/value of local AI is overblown.

In what sustainable world outside of Bay Area jobs do devs spend 120k on tokens monthly?

Nobody said anything about sustainable, or outside of the Bay Area really

Apple can't make devices they sell to 1000 people once, so yes, you did say that, implicitly.

"Apple tax" is such a lazy and inaccurate accusation to level. Sure we've had expensive wheels on the cheese grater (ie Mac Pro) but we've also had:

1. When Apple came out with the real Macbook Air in 2010/2011 (not the silly 2008 one), nobody could compete with it with those specs at that price and they couldn't for years. And every competitor usually sucked in some major way, most often the trackpad;

2. The Mac Mini is an outstanding piece of hardware for $600. Or was;

3. I've generally found that "Apple tax" complaints levelled against the iPhone to be nothing more than Android cope;

4. The M-series silicon has been an absolute game-changer. I honestly thought the first-generation M1s would be not great but they came out swinging. And the price points for these Macbooks have all been great, much better than the last-gasp-of-Johnny-Ive touch bar butterfly keyboard series, which were objectively awful.

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