Why get an Apple? Even th3 keyboard lacks required keys for development. They're purely tech bro poser machines.
Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#12I guess I would buy nvidia digits https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/project-digits/
Is it available for purchase?
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#13Why get an Apple? Even th3 keyboard lacks required keys for development. They're purely tech bro poser machines.
What keys does it lack for development? I haven’t noticed any missing in 40 years of coding on Macs.
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#14Be more specific - AI is a very broad field. nVidia GPUs have the best inference speed (particularly around SDXL, Hunyuan, Flux, etc), but unless you're buying several used 3090s SLI style, you're going to have to split larger LLM GGUFs across main memory and GPU. I'm excluding the RTX 5090 since two of them (plus tax) would basically blow your budget out the water. With Apple I think you can get up to 192GB of share…
I bought a fully tricked out Mac Studio and had planned to use it but I found I was far too busy in my final career and actually it sits idle.
So, while I do not regret my decision based on what I knew at the time, my life trajectory has left it unused.
So, I want to get back to doing LLM work on it for fun, Julia and R programming.
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#15I used to think GPUs were the way to go, but now my goal is to get a used server with a Terabyte of RAM so I can run the full size Deepseek R1
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#16Not precisely what you were looking for, but this was going around yesterday: https://rasim.pro/blog/how-to-install-deepseek-r1-locally-fu...
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#17Here's a nice looking DeepSeek build https://x.com/carrigmat/status/1884244369907278106?mx=2
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#18I guess I would buy nvidia digits https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/project-digits/
Can I just use that to play video games?
Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#19Re: Ask HN: I have $5k to spend on a local AI machine, what should I get?
#20More info needed but for 5k you can get a near maxed mbp that should be able to handle most models, perform pretty well, and also serve as your laptop so it’s not a pure AI box. Then if you have heavier needs go to the cloud.