I run 4 Mac Studio ultras at work (they’re pricy when maxed out), for local-first AI dev services. But there’s a few things that make me want to switch to the Spark. Networking is the biggest one, the Macs have Thunderbolt and Ethernet, but if I run distributed inference with EXO over Thunderbolt; the drop in tokens/second is massive. These Sparks get RDMA and can stack nicely. The other big one is access to CUDA, MLX has come a long way but being able to have CUDA and GPU access in containers would simplify the stack so nicely. If I had a USB-C/Thunderbolt backplane it might compare, but scaling with the Spark is likely a lot more straightforward.

I call the stack with Mac Studios “MacAIver” because it feels like a duct tape solution, but the Spark equivalent would likely be more elegant.