Devs debate 13k Mac Studio versus RTX 5000

For high-end local inference, your hardware decision fundamentally dictates your software constraints.

• –Apple's unified memory (up to 256GB) is the only practical way to fit massive models locally under €13k, but restricts developers to MLX and llama.cpp.
• –The RTX PRO 5000 offers 48GB of VRAM and access to the gold-standard CUDA ecosystem, but limits the size of models you can run without aggressive quantization.
• –Power and thermal limits remain real bottlenecks for home builds, pushing developers away from dual RTX 5090 setups despite their better cost-to-VRAM ratio.