Running AI on your own Mac may cost less than paying per use

Running AI on a laptop you own may be cheaper than renting it from a cloud company, if your team uses AI a lot. That is the argument in a new Apple @ Work column on 9to5Mac. It points to one example where a $6,500 MacBook Pro could pay for itself in 7 to 14 months.

The problem with pay per use

Most business AI is billed by the token, a small chunk of text the AI reads or writes. That works when use is light. Newer AI tools that write code, study documents and handle multistep jobs use far more tokens than a simple chatbot, so the bill grows with them.

The column cites research from Fleet, an IT company. It described a firm that used up its entire 2026 AI budget in four months after giving an AI coding tool to about 5,000 engineers. Finance teams often do not know the total until the invoice arrives.

The case for a Mac

A computer is a one-time cost. After that, running a model mostly costs electricity. Analyst Horace Dediu, writing at Asymco, gave one example: a 26-billion-parameter model used four hours a day, about 150 million tokens a month, costs $450 to $850 per user each month in the cloud.

A 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Max chip and 128GB of memory costs about $6,500 and can run such a model locally. Apple's chips let the graphics processor share all of the computer's memory, so a big model can fit on one laptop. The column says Apple Silicon Macs can stay in service four to five years.

The catches

The math only works if a free, openly available model is good enough for the job. The column says that is increasingly true for summarizing, drafting and routine coding. For the hardest reasoning and coding, top cloud models still lead.

• The usage in Dediu's examples is high. A typical employee does not use 150 million tokens a month.
• Token prices have been falling, which narrows the gap over time.
• Hardware prices are rising because of RAM and GPU shortages.

What happens next

The author is most interested in a hybrid setup, where routine work runs on the Mac and hard tasks go to cloud models. Jamf showed on-device AI tools at its JNUC 2026 event. Apple's Jeremy Butcher said the platform is the best way to do both cloud and on-device AI.