Local AI Deals

The Grid

Every configuration Apple and NVIDIA and ASUS and Apple Certified Refurbished sell today that is worth buying to hold a model, ranked by what a gigabyte of memory costs. Pick the model you mean to run and the Fit, headroom and speed columns recompute for it.

Configs
20
Models
30
Chips
8
Cheapest entry
$1,099

The Grid — 20 Configs

Vendor prices, checked 40 minutes ago
Quant

GeForce RTX 5090 is a card, not a computer: every price shown for it is the cheapest listing we found plus $1,000 for the minimum host machine.

Fit, headroom and speed are computed for Qwen3-235B-A22B at Q4_K_M, 8K context. Open its Model page for the offers and the arithmetic.

What changed

Reseller prices went live on 28 August 2026, read off the resellers’ own pages. The finding is close to the opposite of what a deals site is meant to say: of the nine Mac listings we found, seven are Apple’s price to the cent, one is $100 more, and one is $200 less on a preorder that has not shipped. Most resellers do not stock the high-memory tiers at all. Buying a Mac for local inference, there is almost nothing to save against Apple — except sales tax, which B&H and Adorama both advertise a store card to cover, and which on a $9,499 Mac Studio dwarfs every price difference on this page.

The Grid is no longer Apple-only. NVIDIA DGX Spark and the GeForce RTX 5090 joined it on 27 August 2026, and the ASUS Ascent GX10 — the same GB10 chip and the same 128GB as the Spark for $699 less — on 28 August. A card cannot run a model on its own, so the 5090 is quoted with the minimum host machine included. The card itself runs from $1,999.99 for a Founders Edition to $7,070.58 for a board-partner card, so we quote the cheapest listing we can actually find and print the whole spread on its page.

Apple refreshed both lines on 25 August 2026. Mac mini moved to M6 and M5 Pro; Mac Studio moved to M5 Max and M5 Ultra. The 512GB M5 Ultra ships in late October and Apple has not published its price, so we do not print one.

Four refurbished Mac Studios joined the Grid on 29 August 2026, and they are the only real discounts on it. Every authorised reseller holds Apple’s price to the cent on a new Mac. So the previous generation, sold refurbished by Apple itself, is where the money is. An M3 Ultra with 256GB costs $7,729 against $9,499 for a new M5 Ultra with the same memory. An M4 Max with 128GB costs $4,409 against $5,099 for the new M5 Max with the same memory, a faster chip. They hold the same models and decode slower, because 819GB/s and 546GB/s are slower than this year’s bandwidth — the trade this page exists to price. Refurbished rows say so in their name and carry Apple’s one-year warranty. They can sell out faster than new ones, because Apple says its refurbished supply is usually very limited. Apple’s refurbished store carries no M5 or M6 machine at all: we checked on 29 August and it stops at M4 Max and M3 Ultra.

Bandwidth per chip, each vendor’s published figure: M6 170GB/s, M5 Pro 307GB/s, M5 Max 614GB/s, M5 Ultra 1.2TB/s, GB10 Grace Blackwell 273GB/s, RTX 5090 1.8TB/s, M4 Max 546GB/s, M3 Ultra 819GB/s. Decode is bandwidth-bound, which is why the Ultra is worth its price for large models and wasted on small ones.

Start from a model instead

Side by side

Prices come from each vendor’s own store — apple.com, nvidia.com, asus.com — and from B&H Photo, Adorama, Expercom, Best Buy, Newegg and Amazon, each read off the seller’s own page and stamped with a checked-at time. A configuration a reseller does not carry gets no row rather than a guess. The ranking is by price and never by payout.