I bought an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB RAM for around $9K. At the time, I was worried that once the M5 Ultra comes out, the resale value might drop hard, maybe to the $3K-$4K range.

But with Apple’s recent pricing increases, I’m wondering if that fear is overblown. Is it reasonable to think that even after an M5 Ultra launches, a 512GB RAM M3 Ultra Studio could still hold value reasonably well?

The other side of this is that I bought it thinking I’d do serious local AI / ML / creative work on it, but honestly it’s mostly just sitting around. Part of me thinks I should sell it now while resale demand is still strong. Another part of me wants to keep it, use it properly, and maybe upgrade to an M5 Ultra 512GB model whenever that exists.

For people who have owned high-end Mac Studios, what would you do in this situation?

Would you:

  1. Keep it and actually build a workflow around it

  2. Sell now before the M5 generation arrives

  3. Wait and see how M5 Ultra pricing affects resale

I’m mainly trying to avoid holding expensive hardware just because I like the idea of using it.

Or I am missing anything and there will be more announcements?

I've been experimenting with setting up local LLMs lately, and here's what hit me hard:

Just because it's cheap to build something doesn't mean you should. If a compatible tool already exists for your use case, use it first. Only roll your own once you've confirmed the existing option falls short.

I knew this before — but knowing something in theory and truly understanding it through experience? Completely different.

This is especially important for people who love building things or are early in their careers. AI makes it look like anyone can build anything nowadays, which is both inspiring and misleading. The barrier to start looks low, sure — but the path to actually getting it right still takes time and patience.

Trust me, you'll save yourself a lot of frustration if you internalize this sooner rather than later.

To the experienced folks here: what's one piece of advice you'd give to newbies to help them avoid common mistakes?

This post is refined by minimax2.7 local in openweb UI

True story,

I got interested in AI after seeing it at work and wanted to run models locally. I started with an M3 Ultra 96GB, quickly learned it was not enough for what I wanted, and kept upgrading hardware (including refurbished Mac Studios at 256GB/512GB and now an RTX Pro 6000 that arrived today). I tested many model families (Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma, Minimax, etc.). My current favorite is MiniMax M2.7 230B/A10B. I’m also waiting for LM Studio support for DeepSeek v4 Flash.

I have mixed feelings: excitement about local speed/bandwidth and sadness about how much money I spent learning this stack. Also funny point: my 16GB MacBook Pro has been more stable than my 512GB setup, which crashed multiple times.

Still, I’m convinced local LLMs are the future, and this community helped me learn a lot. Thank you to everyone here.

Question for the group: For people running high-end local setups, what gave you the biggest real-world stability + speed gains (not just benchmark wins)?

If you want, I can also give you a more technical version focused on benchmarks/specs.