Wouldn’t a Mac Mini be a better comparison?
Yes, or Mac Studio. Laptops with screens aren't made to run 24/7 heavy workloads.
Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
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Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#22Your laptop AI costs too much? Speculative investors can help!
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#23OpenRouter and other LLM platforms are being subsidized by VC investment to less than it costs them to run inference, the MacBook Pro is not
When the AI bubble inevitably pops, the author will find a new way to skew results in favor of cloud LLMs. Like including the price of a desk and a chair in the local token cost.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#24How much does your data privacy cost?
As stated in the analysis, thousands of dollars. That said, the smart thing to do is target smaller models (few billion parameters) and then use larger models for non-privacy tasks.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#25OpenRouter and other LLM platforms are being subsidized by VC investment to less than it costs them to run inference, the MacBook Pro is not
When the AI bubble inevitably pops, the author will find a new way to skew results in favor of cloud LLMs. Like including the price of a desk and a chair in the local token cost.
I really wanted the laptop to look better cost-wise, but it doesn't.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#26So I did the India-specific analysis for a tier-3 city. Here, electricity costs 1/3rd of the US version, and you also get solar subsidy up to a certain amount.
tldr;
Hardware deprecation costs are the major factor.
But, if we assume ZERO hardware deprecation (not realistic), then local inference becomes super cheap.. roughly, 90%+ cheaper.
Third case: the break-even happens only if we can get at the very very very least, 8.7 years of useful hardware life. A more realistic number, however, when working 8 hrs/day and not of 24 hrs/day, is around 25 years.
So, for now, local inference is preferable if you deeply care about privacy. From cost perspective, it's still not there.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#27This isn't a good analysis, and it's because it keeps rounding everything up. He rounds up the cost of electricity by 10%. He has a range of power use, takes the high end (which is 2x the low end) and multiplies it by the inflated electricity cost. But then they talk about using a newly purchased Mac to do the inference, running at full capacity, 24/7. Why would you do that? Apple silicon is fast but the author point…
Rounding everything down in the most optimistic setting got me to $0.40 per million tokens, and openrouter has the same model at $.38/mtok.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#28This isn't a good analysis, and it's because it keeps rounding everything up. He rounds up the cost of electricity by 10%. He has a range of power use, takes the high end (which is 2x the low end) and multiplies it by the inflated electricity cost. But then they talk about using a newly purchased Mac to do the inference, running at full capacity, 24/7. Why would you do that? Apple silicon is fast but the author point…
using it 24/7 brings the average cost down, not up.
the less you use local LLM, the less sense it makes since you paid a lot for hardware you don't use
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#29Unless I'm misunderstanding, this is counting the entire laptop in the cost of generating tokens. The calculation seems to omit that, in addition to receiving LLM output, you have also received a laptop in exchange for your money. If you intend to put this machine in a dark corner and run it solely as a token-munching server, a laptop would be an exceptionally poor choice of technology for this purpose. But if you in…
> control over the model used
but you lose access to the most capable models, you can run only the small ones
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#30[dead]