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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

But that would be more for enterprise usage. I cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine.

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> cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine

For me, the privacy pitch wins. I have a friend visiting, however, who spends like $2,400 with Anthropic every year. That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years. (I'm still on my 2020 MacBook Pro. I love it and will be sad when I have to replace it.)

> That's a solid ROI even if the thing becomes obsolete after a couple years.

How can that be a solid return on investment? There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance. Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing.

> There's no model you can run locally to have frontier model level performance

I'm betting he doesn't need a frontier model. Sonnet, today, is likely good for 80% of his tasks, which largely involve repretitive, tedious work.

> Also who spends 2.4k yearly for personal AI usage, like what's the usecase? If your friend is spending that money for his business then it's not personal computing

Combination of business and personal.

That's the $200/mo subscription -- not uncommon :)

I do the $100/mo for myself, then about ~$200/mo for startup.

Do you use it for work? I can’t imagine paying this myself for personal use. I just don’t see the benefits vs. the free models available to me.

People with money and things to do. People spend $100+ a month on coffee without even blinking.

I have a friend who is a teacher and spends that much yearly for ChatGPT and Claude. It saves him many hours a year in time assembling documents and creating posters, flyers, and personalized learning materials for his students.

In addition to privacy I’d like to be able to burn as many tokens as the hardware will let me 24/7 without getting a surprise bill at the end of the month. I don’t care if it is slower that the cloud, I’m not in a hurry.

> I cannot imagine a personal computing usage which can justify a 10k machine.

If Apple released a machine that would let me run, say, DeepSeek V4 Pro or GLM 5.2 locally at 100 tok/s for $10k, I might hurt myself running to get my credit card.

But then, I'm also posting this sitting in my truck while my family attends an event, with a Vision Pro on my face so I can monitor 7 Claude Code sessions without constantly switching screens on my laptop.

$10,000 divided by five divided by 12 is only $166.66 a month without interest over 5 years a Mac M2 Ultra or Mac M3 Ultra are easily usable computers over five years, so are most of the medium to high-end laptops that Apple sells for one person or locally in a small company.

It’s not necessarily out of reach or unusable over the course of time, the thing I keep hearing over and over is how usable many people find Mac’s very useable over the course of time, obviously software support plays a big part of that.

On top of that, AI models are getting more useful despite their smaller size. The future is a personal computer future, not a mainframe computer one. Yes, larger computers are useful, but most people will not be using that larger computers, which will be relegated to universities and larger companies.

I just went to Apple.com and specced out the top of the line 14" Macbook Pro, and the price is $9,849.00. Well over 10K with California sales tax.

I could absolutely justify having that machine for the actual work I do, and I'm not even doing any of the really hard AI things. If I were, I might prefer a Thelio Mega workstation from System76, which is $90,383.00 fully loaded.

Alas I can not afford a 10K personal computer right now, which is not the same thing.

Apple does like to market their hardware for education and small business customers, though.

I think "buy this $10,000 box and to easily grant every Macbook Neo on your team safe, private, free AI" could be a real winner.

Apple is a premium brand with high brand loyalty. Do you not think even 1 billionaire would want something like that? Even to just say that they bought it. Apple could sell things at a price point much more than $10k.

There's only so many billionaires and at Apple's scale you would not offer such a product for public sale even if you do custom builds for the rich and famous.

Apple makes product lines with assembly lines, its not a hand fab or custom build type of place.

At the end of the day, it’s just an Apple computer, not a Ferrari or an Aston Martin. I hardly think an Apple computer can be considered as a luxury item, unless they release it as a limited edition

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