Beautiful complement to this post, and that reaches a similar conclusion to mine: "Prototype on the API, find your real use case, measure what you actually spend in tokens, and then make the hardware decision with real data instead of a vibe. That order matters, because almost everyone who buys first ends up owning a box that does not match the workload they eventually land on. And if you can, wait for memory prices to cool before you buy, because right now, you are shopping at the top of a spike."
Another good one I came across on local inference: https://coles.codes/posts/local-models-mid-2026
Beautiful complement to this post, and that reaches a similar conclusion to mine: "Prototype on the API, find your real use case, measure what you actually spend in tokens, and then make the hardware decision with real data instead of a vibe. That order matters, because almost everyone who buys first ends up owning a box that does not match the workload they eventually land on. And if you can, wait for memory prices to cool before you buy, because right now, you are shopping at the top of a spike."
Source: https://x.com/RayFernando1337/status/2070621713952579990