DRAM spot prices are something like what they were 4 years ago. Having RAM for cheap is nice. But it doesn't cost an extraordinary amount. I recently needed some RAM and was able to pick up 16x32 DDR4 for $1600. That's about twice as expensive as it used to be but $1600 is pretty cheap for 512 GiB of RAM.
A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.
you running a server or local llms with a need for 512?
Server stuff. Nothing interesting. Supermicro H11 + Epyc 7xxx + RAM. I have a 6x4090 setup for local LLMs and I got myself a 128 GB M4 Max laptop thinking I'd do that, but if I'm being honest I need to get rid of that hardware. It's sitting idle because the SOTA ones are so much better for what I want.
> A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now
Where do you live? In Poland it's 740usd.
However, 16gb is very little for a Mac where the OS itself uses 7GB
It is perfectly usable for essential use cases. This thing also has very fast swap and is good at it.
$400 or $499?