“I would like to eventually get to a point where I'm not giving all my data over to these companies. I think it's coming. I don't think it's here yet. And I don't think buying expensive hardware now is going to really move you along. You're going to want to buy the good hardware in a couple of years when the models are up to it.”

Mac Power Users · November 2026

Context

Wrapping up the discussion of very expensive Macs for running local models, David's advice is to wait: the hardware worth buying for private, local AI is a couple of years out.

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Transcript

Mac Power Users Around 19:26 into the episode

David Sparks

…a fully loaded M3 Ultra or maybe M2 Ultra was probably 15. It was probably half the cost. But at this price, well, we had a professional on the show just a few weeks ago, Michael, a professional musician, award-winning. And he wasn't willing to spend the money to buy it for his production machine.

Stephen Robles

…has been so good, which he shared with us. He's still using an M1 Max Mac Studio. They are so good that people will hold on to them for a long time. And so, you know, maybe, again, five, 10 years from now, you could buy a refurbished 512 gig RAM Mac Studio. But anyway, it's exciting that it exists.

David Sparks

One other angle to this is, you know, the RAM companies are spinning up. Foundries are being formed. It's going to take a couple of years to get those to a point where they start entering the stream. We could have a situation where the race to build server farm slows down. I mean, there's a number of ways that scenarios where that happens. There's a lot of ways where memory gets cheaper and storage gets cheaper in a few years. So maybe the price will go down in a couple of years too on new hardware. But I feel like if you're excited about local models, I am. I would like to eventually get to a point where I'm not giving all my data over to these companies. I think it's coming. I don't think it's here yet. And I don't think buying expensive hardware now is going to really move you along. You're going to want to buy the good hardware in a couple of years when the models are up to it. And we just got to wait.

Stephen Robles

Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about what is out now, which is the MacBook Pro with a touchscreen for the first time, David.

David Sparks

Yeah, the ProLED. The ProLED.

Stephen Robles

The ProLED. Pro-LED XDR. Apple is calling this the MacBook Pro with Pro-LED XDR display. It is the first MacBook with a dynamic island and a tandem OLED display up to 2,000 nits brightness. It is powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max. So all the rumors were right. We did not get an M6 Max or Pro chip.…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Mac Power Users

“App developers are going to have a time. They've already had a time with iPhone Duo, and now to think about their apps on a touchscreen. Mac developers, if you only made Mac apps, never had to think about touch at all. And starting today, now you do. And you have to figure out how your app is going to interact with a touchscreen, which is wild.” — Stephen Robles, Mac Power Users

“I thought they were going to do something really cool with the operating system. Remember when they added the mouse support to the iPad, how they redid mouse support like you've never seen before, and the interface would kind of organically grow up around wherever the pointer was? It looks to me like they really didn't do that here. There's not a lot of affordance for touch on an interface that was never designed for touch.” — David Sparks, Mac Power Users