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Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

williamangel.net

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Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#211

Post by PAndreew »

quietsegfault wrote: post #45
650REDHAIR wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll keep my data local over a $.02/mtok difference.

It’s more than just data locality. OpenRouter is faster, no? I have an M4 pro, and anything but the smallest dumbest models are unusably slow for interactive use. I personally haven’t yet found a good use case for offline/non-interactive LLM work locally.

I’m running a local Whisper + Gemma 4 pipeline with a cheap USB mic to extract health related data and potential todos from ambient speech. It doesn’t have to be fast doesn’t have to be 100% correct because if it captures at least a few bits of interesting information that would otherwise go unnoticed it’s still a win.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#212

Post by ffsm8 »

orangecat wrote: post #196
sgt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And it's gonna be interesting wherever this narrative will shift over the next 5 yrs

I keep hearing that properties are in the biggest bubble yet in the USA - with the affordable housing shortage being a red herring, because real estate managers and boomers are unwilling/unable to reduce their prices - despite not getting renters/buyers because it would kick off a death spiral as their interests would consequently go up (because of lower security). Along with the ai layoffs etc

I'm not American so I only hear the occasional interview so don't have any idea if it's really as pressing as these industry professionals keep saying but I'm definitely at the edge of my seat watching...

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#214

Post by varispeed »

What is the security of OpenRouter? I have a feeling user has no idea where their data is going and how it will be used or am I wrong?

When I see so many options, that looks like it would take months to audit whether it actually makes sense and is safe to use. But I guess some people are fine with YOLO-ing it.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#215

Post by orangecat »

sgt wrote: post #210
orangecat wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely though, the HOA and all that would likely be baked into a renter's price. And you didn't need to go live in a HOA. I don't, and it's much cheaper.

Surely though, the HOA and all that would likely be baked into a renter's price.

Sure, the same way that the benefits of a fixed mortgage payment are baked into sale prices. The efficient market hypothesis would say that neither renting nor buying should be obviously superior in the long term, because if either was then people would bid up rents/prices until it wasn't.

And you didn't need to go live in a HOA

I pretty much did, unless I wanted to significantly compromise on other factors.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#216

Post by mbgerring »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #136
mbgerring wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t reply to the reply here, but yes, you do pay for it with money. Absorbing all of America’s capital and construction labor capacity to build AI data centers, rather than, for example, reaching parity with every other developed country in transportation infrastructure, is a cost you pay every day in gas and time spent in traffic. More to the point, building AI datacenters without paying for modernizing the grid i…

I live in one of the developed countries, not in the US.

In that case, I’m subsidizing your cheap token costs. You’re welcome.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#217

Post by tamimio »

> Throwing money at anthropic makes more sense in this context.

But you are dependent on them, which is the biggest factor IMO, there was a website posted here before of people getting banned from using it over silly reasons, not to mention price hikes, or privacy concerns. Maybe now it’s more expensive or slower to run locally, but you are in full control of everything.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#218

Post by xienze »

BoorishBears wrote: post #187
xienze wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in addition to receiving LLM output, you have also received a laptop in exchange for your money And, since it's a Mac, whenever you're ready to upgrade it'll still have a fairly decent resale value.

How is it going to have decent resale when you bought it for $15,000 over MSRP because of a time-limited LLM mass-psychosis? https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=apple+mac+studio+m3+ult... I think you'd need to tinker quickly, realize anything with CUDA (other than the awful DGX Spark) is better for learning, the prefill is killing your ability to actually run models large enough to justify that RAM, and then cure yo…

Well obviously I'm not talking about buying over MSRP.

Re: Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

#219

Post by ____tom____ »

One important difference is that costs are bounded on your own machine. Like with cloud providers, I'm always worried that cost may accidentally explode if I launch an agent swarm wrong.

Now, it looks like the providers I use have good limits. But I do worry about this.

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