Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#101

Post by visarga » Sun, May 17, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#102

Post by mpyne » Sun, May 17, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

faitswulff wrote: post #46

bastawhiz wrote: post #14

This 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…

The article makes no sense. I can't use OpenRouter as a general purpose computing device. Why are we comparing a whole computer to a single purpose SaaS?

They're responding to the people doing things like buying the most expensive Mac they can find specifically to do local inference for their AI agents.

Some do it to have control over their ability to use AI. Some do it because they think it will be cheaper to not have to pay a SaaS to generate tokens for them.

But for those interested in the latter case, it seems like it's not actually cheaper after all, at least at current prices. But then I don't expect prices to drastically jump because of how much competition there is in model development.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#103

Post by mpyne » Sun, May 17, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #86

cyanydeez wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nothing about the current data center craze looks efficient.

Probably because lots of data centres are being built (or half-built) which are sitting idle.

If there are datacenters sitting idle right now then you could probably make a lot of money selling that capacity to Anthropic at this point...

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#104

Post by datadrivenangel » Sun, May 17, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

FuckButtons wrote: post #92

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because there are a lot of people writing articles about the benefits of running local models. I think it's fair to say that there are daily threads on HN singing the praises or local inference. I also see people buying new hardware where the main trigger is ability to run local models.

But the people who want to do local inference are putting some amount of value on privacy that’s not captured by the raw monetary value so just comparing the price is somewhat beside the point, it’s also true that, if you have eg a Mac and you use that as your main computing device then you would have spent money on it anyway, so you can’t even really compare its value to spend on something that’s not general purpose…

My overall opinion is that the smart thing is not to upgrade to the maximum memory for AI purposes. It's worth quantifying how much extra we pay for privacy.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#105

Post by visarga » Sun, May 17, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #83

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…

So many more efficiencies possible at scale though. I cannot keep a local model 98% utilized 24/7, at least not with my current workload. A big cloud can. I can’t power my servers with DC, I have this AC to DV conversion nonsense. The list goes on.

Besides fill factor being hard to match, there is also scaling - you can't scale local inference 10x for a spike, but you can with cloud inference.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#106

Post by mbgerring » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

Now include the externalized cost in the U.S. of deploying ~100% of productive capital to build data centers instead of, for example, first-world transportation infrastructure, and tell me which one is cheaper

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#107

Post by datadrivenangel » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #41

Mmmm, nope if you do the smart thing. MacBook M5 max 128gb is a premium laptop at 6k, but with it you can do many things and is your good main driver for the day. Then, it can also run DeepSeek V4 flash and perform non trivial tasks locally, without censorship or limitations, even without an internet connection and on very privacy sensitive data. That's a good deal. If you buy 25k for a dual Mac Studio 512gb to aband…

The smart thing is to get a ~48gb MacBook and use it as your daily driver, and then budget ~$800/year for AI subscriptions or tokens and you'll end up at the same price.

I say, as the author of the blog post, writing this on a MacBook M5 max 128gb..

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#108

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

FuckButtons wrote: post #92

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because there are a lot of people writing articles about the benefits of running local models. I think it's fair to say that there are daily threads on HN singing the praises or local inference. I also see people buying new hardware where the main trigger is ability to run local models.

But the people who want to do local inference are putting some amount of value on privacy that’s not captured by the raw monetary value so just comparing the price is somewhat beside the point, it’s also true that, if you have eg a Mac and you use that as your main computing device then you would have spent money on it anyway, so you can’t even really compare its value to spend on something that’s not general purpose…

I replied to a comment asking why the article exists.

As for privacy, I'm sure there are many people that are not so interested in that aspect.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#109

Post by formerly_proven » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #27

bastawhiz wrote: post #14

This 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.

What is it with AI SaaS naming themselves "openxyz" when there is 0% open about them?

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#110

Post by Danox » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

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.

The problem is I don’t think computing is going back to the mainframe era you know where all the computing is done remotely and the only thing you have in front of you is a terminal that is the AI slop maker’s dream, the computing power on the desktop/laptop/tablet/phone is getting better and the models are getting smaller and quicker.

There is no moat. In the end, what we are calling AI today will just be something that is incorporated into an existing programs that people will use to help them accomplish a task. The public will not be paying more for it. It will just be a commodity added to the existing ecosystems we have today. They