Yeah, it’s not a hard rule, it’s just not consistent and depends on your upgrades.
If you bought the mid-late 2010s models for example you basically needed ram upgrades, which cost an arm and a leg. Early M1 the swap was fast so RAM was acceptable at defaults, but also if you bought an M1 or M2 Max you really lucked out with LLMs and prices overall. M3 mini at 64gb I think was unbeatable value.
Current gen everything is fucked, but they’re pushing Mac Studio for LLM clusters and so no, they’re not cheaper anymore. They’re cheaper than a $100K GPU.
The first generation of Arm Mac’s were pretty cost effective.
Yeah, it’s not a hard rule, it’s just not consistent and depends on your upgrades.
If you bought the mid-late 2010s models for example you basically needed ram upgrades, which cost an arm and a leg. Early M1 the swap was fast so RAM was acceptable at defaults, but also if you bought an M1 or M2 Max you really lucked out with LLMs and prices overall. M3 mini at 64gb I think was unbeatable value.
Current gen everything is fucked, but they’re pushing Mac Studio for LLM clusters and so no, they’re not cheaper anymore. They’re cheaper than a $100K GPU.