I simply can't go back to cloud AI. Privacy and full control are more important to me than speed and SOTA models.
Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
11–20 of 322 posts
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#12Wouldn’t a Mac Mini be a better comparison?
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#13[deleted]
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#14This 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 points out: you're only getting 10-40 tokens per second. It's not bad, but it's not meant for this!
It's comparing apples to oranges. Yeah, data centers don't pay residential electricity rates. Data centers use chips that are power efficient. Data centers use chips that aren't designed to be a Mac.
Apple silicon works out pretty good if you're not burning tokens 24/7/365 and you're not buying hardware specifically to do it. I use my Mac Studio a few times a week for things that I need it for, but I can run ollama on it over the tailnet "for free". The economics work when I'm not trying to make my Mac Studio behave like a H100 cluster with liquid cooling. Which should come as no surprise to anyone: more tokens per watt on hardware that's multi tenant with cheap electricity will pretty much always win.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#15"Accelerated depreciation (if any) from shortening the lifespan of the device will be more expensive than the electricity"
Shortening the lifespan?
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#16Unless 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…
Yeah, a better metric might be, the difference in cost between the laptop you need to run local models, and the laptop you would have bought anyway.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#17The full-amortization framing is doing a lot of work here. I bought my laptop because I needed a laptop, not as an inference box, and running a model on it is incidental to that. Once the hardware is sunk for other reasons, the only cost left is electricity plus whatever depreciation you accelerate by hammering the SoC, which the post actually acknowledges in one parenthetical before allocating the full $4299 to tokens anyway.
Also nobody I know picks local over OpenRouter on price. They pick it for offline, for data not leaving the machine, for no rate limits, for not having a provider go down mid-task. If $/Mtok is the only axis, sure, cloud wins.
In practice the pattern I see is leaving a small model running on easy background tasks while using the laptop normally, not a dedicated inference box hammered flat out for 5 years.
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#18Open router doesn't cost money per say, it depends on the providers pricing
> OpenRouter has Gemma4 31b at ~38-50 cents per million tokens. This means that on the optimistic side (50 watts, 40 tokens per second, and 10 years) the pro max is as cheap as openrouter. On the pessimistic side (100 watts and 3 years at 10 tokens per second) the pro max is 10x the cost. I think ~3x the cost per million tokens is likely the right number for local inference on the pro max from an accounting perspective.
Apart from that, like detailed in the the article, pricing for local compute also depends on electricity prices.
By the way, I don't want to snark about it, my English is not very good, but it's "per se", not "per say". Just commenting on this petty thing because it seems to be a common misspelling, and it always trips me up a bit. Makes me wonder about another supposed meaning like "from hearsay".
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#19Slightly different slice into this a very similar situation (local vs OpenRouter AI inference).
But in _every_ metric other than privacy it was better to run via OpenRouter than a local model, and not by a small amount.
Direct link to the comparison charts:
https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...
Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
#20I like that the numbers were crunched, but the answer to these is always a bit of a foregone conclusion.
* Industrial power pricing
* Wholesale hardware pricing
* Utilization density of shared API
means API always wins a cost shootout.
Privacy & tinkering is cool too though