Not everyone can afford a top-of-the-line Mac and the electricity cost to run it is high. It will never run Frontier models, which you can use for the price of a Netflix sub.

Also a lot of people work from laptops and running inference on data centres for 10th of the price is a no-brainer. Local models are more of a niche and always will be.

MacBook Air + Claude max sub for 20 years would still cost less before a maxed-out Mac Studio makes sense (not taking into account running costs), even then it’s not a Frontier or as fast.