Cryptopolitan Report: Apple Says Ditch The AI Meter. 39% Of Our Readers Agree

On September 22, Apple began shipping new Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops, pitching them as a one-time hardware purchase for running AI models locally rather than paying cloud providers per token. The Mac mini starts at $899, while the Mac Studio with Apple's M5 Ultra chip starts at $5,499, with fully configured versions near $20,000. Tokens are small text units used to bill cloud AI usage. In the same week, Anthropic cut Claude Opus 5.5 prices by 20%, and OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna at about half its previous model's price. In the newsletter's reader poll, 38.71% chose owning hardware, about 31.6% chose pay per token, and 29.7% said it depends on the workload.