Apple Silicon vs OpenRouter: Why Local LLM Inference Costs More Than the Cloud
The pitch for running LLMs on your own Mac is seductive: no rate limits, no API keys, no data leaving the machine. Then you put the actual numbers in a spreadsheet and the cloud wins on cost alone — usually by 30x or more. A Hacker News thread on offline LLM energy use this week ran the arithmetic, and the gap between "feels free" and "actually free" is wider than most developers expect. The framing matters: when developers compare local vs cloud they usually mean "free vs metered." That mental...
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