Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple store's current options for mac studio seem to max out at 96GB. I'm questioning ROI, esp. given it's not upgradeable. Curious about others' takes on new mac hardware.
I'd held off from buying a new personal laptop for quite a few years and felt that the M5-128gb was justifiable once I started really seeing payoffs from using AI at work. Running w/ Cursor and doing some "nights and weekends" type coding / conversations, I was hitting $100-200 of usage within a few weeks. I know there's probably better ways to manage costs, but I was getting enough value out of it to keep bumping my…
>"...if you're strategic about your usage, the ability to "talk for free" and occasionally "burst" to an online provider or having some hugging-face tokens to try out different models that you can't quite run locally is really nice. Talking to the AI (locally) to even just do non-coding planning without worrying about data leakage or privacy issues is phenomenal, and you end up owning a really nice laptop!"
^ this resonates, loudly.