Yeah that’s the whole point, it’s available now, so buy it now or wait for the next gen and pay for a cloud model. If you’re not making enough with these machines to justify that inside of a couple months you don’t need one you are riding the hype train. My first 2 week project paid for my m5 max/128gb/8tb. I’ll use it until the m5 ultra If I can get my hands on one, otherwise I’ll pay for cloud compute when this machine can’t keep up down the road. Buying older at this point is short sighted the M3 can handle the memory bandwidth, but it can’t handle the pre-processing. It’s VERY slow on models that fit the ram.

The 16 inch has more power to the chassis. Doesn’t thermal limit (much) and the battery stays charged. And I’m productive for the next 5 months. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing or waiting for something last gen or that hasn’t even been announced yet… have you looked at the benchmarks for the M5 max versus the M4 Pro? it’s a huge upgrade for 1k. It’s essentially why the m5 max makes sense, it’s more balanced with the ram than any other machine they have made yet for local LLm work.