> maybe tell us how much a non-Apple system that you can run that (probably similarly or faster) would cost?

Ryzen AI Max 395+ with 128GB of unified memory can be found around $3-4k.

But 27B isn't that large, either, especially if you are ok with the quantized models. So this laptop choice seems to more be a "because they had it" rather than "this is what's necessary for this particular workflow"