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Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

williamangel.net

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Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#111

Post by Sinidir »

Article is seriously wrong, because it makes a huge mistake in the last part. You can't simply look at the produced tokens and that is your cost. In agentic coding there are lots of turns meaning you not only pay for the output tokens you also pay for all the input tokens sent each time (even if a lot cheaper, like 10x when cached). So this calculation does not accurately represent the api cost at all.

Second thing is you can starkly upgrade the token generation locally if you use agent teams. Single conversations are memory bandwidth bound and don't fully make use of your compute. If you can batch tokens from multiple agents you can easily 5x token generation.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#112

Post by ekojs »

sleepyeldrazi wrote: post #64

If you want a good dense model, use qwen3.6 27B instead, speed will be up, and if you don't take my word for it being smarter, take openrouter's prices of it against the bigger, slower and less memory-efficient gemma do the talking. If you want a faster model, go for qwen3.6 35B (or gemma 4 26B if gemma models perform better for your tasks). There is a reason why people (myself included) haven't shut up about those t…

Not disagreeing with your argument, but:

> If you want a good dense model, use qwen3.6 27B instead, speed will be up, and if you don't take my word for it being smarter, take openrouter's prices of it against the bigger, slower and less memory-efficient gemma do the talking.

Don't know if this is the correct read. I think those providers are simply taking cue from Alibaba's first-party pricing for the 27B Dense. It's kinda overpriced imo. Perhaps it can be explained by how 'reasoning-inefficient' (relative to frontier models or even Gemma) the Qwen models are and longer sequence lengths are expensive to serve.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#113

Post by bjt »

vlovich123 wrote: post #93
dijit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are ya fuckin' serious mate? The restaurant next to the mines were profitable up until the moment the mines themselves shut down: one doesn't exist without the other. You can't ringfence inference as "the profitable bit" and then hand-wave away the training. Without continuous training there is no inference product. Claude 3 Opus isn't sitting there making revenue in 2026 - the thing is just deprecated . The moment y…

> They're on a treadmill where stopping is death, and the treadmill costs $10bn a year to keep running. You’re literally describing all companies. Google takes about $270bn/year to run. If they stopped spending that they’d die pretty darn quick. It’s also a description of working - unless you’d built up significant savings, if you stopped working you’re also going to die.

> You’re literally describing all companies.

No, not quite. It really comes down to opex vs capex and the depreciation schedule for your investment.

Software development is typically categorized as capex, on a 3-5 year depreciation schedule. You assume the software you write today will be generating value for you that long.

If a big, expensive model training project only gives you value for a year or less, that is not like most companies.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#114

Post by onesociety2022 »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #42
JSR_FDED wrote: post #12

Wouldn’t a Mac Mini be a better comparison?

Also after a few years you can sell and upgrade. A 2022 Mac Studio w/ M1 Ultra and 128gb was ~$5200 new and I see them selling for over $4k on eBay. Can’t sell your used tokens…

You can’t actually - due to the RAM shortage you can’t even upgrade to an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM. That model has been discontinued. Even the 96GB model has a wait time of 5 months in most locations. This is the reason why the resale value is so high.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#115

Post by no-name-here »

vlovich123 wrote: post #75
dijit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitable for inference if you completely ignore training costs and that you absolutely must continuously train new models.

Which is where your analogy breaks down and why you think you’re taking crazy pills. Inference is growing and selling the oranges in your analogy. Model building is growing the farm to sell larger, juicier more addicting oranges.

> Inference is growing and selling the oranges in your analogy. Model building is growing the farm to sell larger, juicier more addicting oranges.

In this analogy, model training would be akin to developing better oranges, but your competitors are also developing better oranges so if you stop spending heavily to improve your oranges, consumers are going to buy ~zero oranges from you within a couple years. (Expanding the farm might be analogous to expanding data centers.)

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#116

Post by asjir »

Danox wrote: post #99
tempest_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the model training that is dragging them down. If the arms race stopped tomorrow the current price pays for the inference.

But isn’t training models, a forever task like iterating in tech you can never take a day off, adding humans to the equation don’t humans train/teach themselves new skills over a lifetime, and isn’t one of the selling points in the future when selling this AI slop your AI never goes to sleep and can always be trained forever? The AI price for entry as we go on into the future will only increase.

Just keeping it up to date with competitors is much cheaper, by copying better ones like Qwen did with Claude. Also a bunch of research is trickling into open source / arxiv so catching up should continue becoming cheaper at least as a fraction of training from scratch

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#117

Post by datadrivenangel »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #34
nu11ptr wrote: post #15

"Accelerated depreciation (if any) from shortening the lifespan of the device will be more expensive than the electricity" Shortening the lifespan?

The amount of FUD and notion that hardware depreciates in this manner is widely held. I blame Michael Burry of the Big Short who is perpetuating these lies to the investor community today. There's a bunch of retro hardware which should make people pause and realize they're stupid to assume hardware slows down on average even 5% 20 years later (it's probably closer to 2% and I'm being generous). HVAC/power delivery an…

There are tons of things that can start failing on hardware. I don't realistically expect some LLM usage to materially reduce the lifespan of the laptop, but running it 24/7 for AI usage makes me think that I'm more likely to get 3 years out of the device instead of 10.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#118

Post by asjir »

visarga wrote: post #101
dijit wrote: post #59

Frontier AI companies are selling at a loss. Excusing everything else that u/bastawhiz said[0]; the obvious fact here is that Claude, OpenAI, Gemini et al. are quite literally burning through 100's of billions of dollars and selling it back to you for pennies on the dollar in the hopes that they get to be the only one left. If I spend $10 growing Oranges and sell them to you for $1; then of course it's more expensive…

> Frontier AI companies are selling at a loss. There are huge economies to be had by batching requests and using lots of RAM for MoE (sparse models). You can't achieve that efficiency at batch size 1 on a single node.

Exactly, they put a lot of money into engineering and it does give results

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#119

Post by datadrivenangel »

freakynit wrote: post #26

So 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. https://shorturl.at/q6gRE 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 ge…

I think your link is broken? Would love to see the analysis as well.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#120

Post by no-name-here »

tiffanyh wrote: post #72
ianberdin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a proof? Anthropic’s CEO said they Are profitable. Same with OpenAI.

Do you mind sharing source links to that profitability claim? I’m struggling to find the quotes.

Open AI: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/

Anthropic: https://x.com/jaminball/status/2052112309364162874

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