Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#191

Post by initatus » Sun, May 17, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

no-name-here wrote: post #120

tiffanyh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My reading on anthropic is that he strongly infers that they're profitable, realizes what he has said and immediately walks it back as explicitly not the case today and reframes it as a guess about some indeterminate point in the future.

> Those are the economics of the industry today, or not today but where we're projecting forward in a year or two.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#192

Post by throwa356262 » Sun, May 17, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #167

datadrivenangel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

I agree with you, practically. But there is another angle of the story: for instance models are starting to be useless to do security stuff, since they are every day more censored. Also prices skyrocketed in the latest months, what will happen later? A few months ago I was shocked people resisted to spend 20$/month to get basically free frontier models, and I warned we were headed to house monthly rent figures in the…

"starting to be useless to do security stuff, since they are every day more censored"

I have not observed this at all, If anything the big 3 are getting both better and more helpful in this area. And if you pass the security checks Antropic will give you Limited access to Mythos.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#193

Post by teekert » Sun, May 17, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

nativeit wrote: post #145

datadrivenangel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But once all that is done you still own a Mac in one case, and you don’t in the other, correct?

Plus your privacy.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#194

Post by Groxx » Sun, May 17, 2026, 5:50 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…

https://old.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1tbb5bj/gith...

Seems to be on its way! I know of at least one person whose company is looking at a 20x increase, and afaict (from related looking around, nothing concrete tho) business accounts are missing some costs in the calculator so it'll likely be higher.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#195

Post by loeg » Sun, May 17, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

hadlock wrote: post #188

ericpauley wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far from a universal truth: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal... Real estate is only a clearly good investment if you ignore opportunity cost.

It never fails, there's always someone who trots this thing out. We had bought our house, and then had to move and decided to rent. I was APPALLED that they wanted me to fill out an APPLICATION form, where they would decide my worth, and let me know if we would be allowed to live there. When buying a house, my cash was as good as anyone elses'. And then the management company would come inside my house to inspect tha…

> I was APPALLED that they wanted me to fill out an APPLICATION form, where they would decide my worth, and let me know if we would be allowed to live there. When buying a house, my cash was as good as anyone elses'.

House sellers receive offers from buyers, sometimes including letters, and can choose to sell to any of them (or none of them), whether or not those offers are higher than the listed price. It's not so different.

> And then the management company would come inside my house to inspect that I wasn't running a meth lab or something.

Yeah that part is different. I also prefer owning.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#196

Post by orangecat » Sun, May 17, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #176

ericpauley wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far from a universal truth: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal... Real estate is only a clearly good investment if you ignore opportunity cost.

Articles like that still miss a bit of the nuance. Imagine having your house paid for, and you grow old and you have no rent to pay. Yes, you could have invested but likely you would have spent some of that money on something else, or your investments might have not worked out so well, or any other reason. Human reasons, to be specific. Owning property is like a lock.

Imagine having your house paid for, and you grow old and you have no rent to pay.

My home is "paid for". Except for the HOA and property taxes that are not that far off from what I was previously paying in rent, the ongoing maintenance costs with random large spikes, and the opportunity cost of having a large chunk of money in the house and not in the market. It was still probably the right decision, but it's not at all a free lunch.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#197

Post by raincole » Sun, May 17, 2026, 6:00 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…

You should probably take some stay-on-topic pills, as this article is clearly and unambiguously talking about open weight models (e.g. gemma 4), not the ones allegedly being sold at a loss (Opus, ChatGPT, etc)[0].

[0]: these API are not sold at a loss either, by the way. But it's a nice meme so let's just pretend they are.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#198

Post by lowbloodsugar » Sun, May 17, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #6

Unless 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…

OpenRouter can’t play Cyberpunk 2077 max setting 5K HDR!

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#199

Post by lowbloodsugar » Sun, May 17, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #29

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #6

Unless 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

Sure. I have unlimited credits for AI with my job, but I’m learning by running things locally. Start by running OpenRouter, then downloading open source tools to run locally, then modifying some python, now creating pipelines in rust. Yes, the irony is that I’m using Opus to crack these things open.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#200

Post by energy123 » Sun, May 17, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #82

vlovich123 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

What's the point of these words and analogies when the only thing that matters is numbers. Gross margins of 20% versus 70% makes a world of difference (literally the difference between a company that's about to collapse and a multi-trillion dollar self-sustaining juggernaut) but in your world of words these two companies are the same thing.