Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
williamangel.net259 points by datadrivenangel 9 hours ago
259 points by datadrivenangel 9 hours ago
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 points out: you're only getting 10-40 tokens per second. It's not bad, but it's not meant for this!
It's comparing apples to oranges. Yeah, data centers don't pay residential electricity rates. Data centers use chips that are power efficient. Data centers use chips that aren't designed to be a Mac.
Apple silicon works out pretty good if you're not burning tokens 24/7/365 and you're not buying hardware specifically to do it. I use my Mac Studio a few times a week for things that I need it for, but I can run ollama on it over the tailnet "for free". The economics work when I'm not trying to make my Mac Studio behave like a H100 cluster with liquid cooling. Which should come as no surprise to anyone: more tokens per watt on hardware that's multi tenant with cheap electricity will pretty much always win.
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?
Not always. The calculations take its useful life expectancy as an input. If they estimate it correctly you have highly likelihood of it breaking, burning out or being woefully out of date by the end. At the 10 year window you are looking at losing support for security updates.
So if you are lucky you might end up with something that still runs but most folks won't find it particularly useful
Yea this; it’s the same reason why mortgaging is cheaper than renting
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.
Real estate is generally a "good" investment as it's considered a relatively safe way to get significant leverage. 5x leverage in the case of a 20% deposit, or even up to 20x leverage with countries that allow for 5% deposits (New Zealand).
In addition, the interest payments almost always end up being near the rent the owner would have paid, so mortgage payments are higher, but that increase is generally (and quickly becomes) principal while being able to counteract inflation of rent.
You also need to pay close attention to rent vs purchase ratios. A lot of cities are cheap to rent but expensive to buy (eg beijing 10 years ago).
Key word being „ago“.
I’m covering my bases because Chinese real estate has been volatile recently and I’m not sure where the market is at now. It could be that renting is still way cheaper than buying, I just don’t have any direct experience to back that up. If I bought while I was living in Beijing I would probably be underwater with my investment right now, renting for 9 years was the right call and my rent was pretty affordable anyways.
Such cities still exist and have been in such a state for decades. They can change but that's meaningless as they can also change the other way around.
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.
You and Matt Levine would get along: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/matt-levines-money...
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.
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.