Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter

A cost analysis comparing Apple Silicon inference to OpenRouter cloud services finds that local inference on an M5 MacBook Pro costs approximately $1.50 per million tokens when accounting for hardware depreciation and electricity, making it roughly 3x more expensive than OpenRouter's comparable models while also being 2x slower. For most practical scenarios, cloud inference through OpenRouter is more economical, though local inference becomes competitive under optimistic conditions (low power consumption, high token throughput, long device lifespan), and the speed advantage of cloud services makes it particularly worthwhile for work scenarios where employee salaries dwarf token costs.