Mac Studio and Mac Mini demand is unreal. About half of the configurations are straight up just not available and the other half require a 10-12 week minimum lead time. A new M3 Ultra 28-Core CPU 60-Core GPU 96GB RAM 1TB SSD sells for around a $2,300 premium on eBay. Picks and shovels!

my mac studio is taking up >200GB in system data now, this is outside of the OS itself. that's pretty remarkable, buying any 256GB machine is not a great idea these days at all. i don't think 512GB is enough either.

Take two: Mac Studio m4 Max recipe Qwen3.8-Flash-Next update Average 83tok/s • MTP off→MTP3 weighted decode: 36.64→68.31 tok/s (1.86×) • MTP3→MTP6 5,999-token decode: 70.44→83.06 tok/s (+17.9%) • TrueScore: 91.8→91.9 •256k context Deployment:

Just canceled my Mac Studio order. After sharing on X that I ordered a Mac Studio with 96GB of RAM, which I thought could be my first foray into local ai, a bunch of people told me, this just wouldn't cut it. This was already really expensive for me, never spent even close to this much on a single computer. So, I don't think I can afford local ai right now. I think I'll just need to continue to live vicariously through people here on X with much bigger budgets than me! Thanks for all the feedback everyone, definitely would rather save the money here if this isn't powerful enough to run local ai in a meaningful way.