Performance (tok/s and PP) or quality (model size)? Pick one.
In terms of GPU memory bandwidth (models fitting in the ~48GB of RTX 5000 Pro card), the RTX card I described above has over 2x the bandwidth of an M5 Max.
If leveraging system RAM (the 128GB-256GB outside the GPU) to run larger models, then the memory bandwidth is ~6x slower than M5 Max.
For models fitting in the ~48GB RTX memory, like dense Qwen3.5 27B models, the RTX will be 2-4x faster than M5 Max. For models that don't fit in the 48GB RTX memory, the M5 Max will be 5-20x faster.
Also worth considering future upgrades: Do you plan to throw away the machine in a few years, or pick up multiple used RTX 6000 Pro cards when people start ditching them?
Side note, I read that GrapheneOS project is having some challenges recently.. between [0]the Android kernel drivers no longer having their Git history of changes being released (only a code dump with no history) - and [1]one of Graphene's two core contributors being detained/conscripted into a war.
Meta's entire business model is to own users and their content.
Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. their focus is to acquire users, keep them in their platforms, and own their content - because /human attention is fundamentally valuable/.
Meta owns 40% of the most popular social media platforms today, but their attention economies face great threats: YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, WeChat, and many more threaten to unseat them every year.
Most importantly, the quality of content on these platforms greatly influences their popularity. If Meta can accelerate AI development in all forms, then it means the content quality across all apps/platforms can be equalized - video on YouTube or TikTok will be no more high quality than on Facebook or Instagram. Messages on Threads will be no more engaging than that on Twitter. Their recent experiments with AI generated profiles[0] signals this is the case.
Once content quality - and luring creators to your platform - are neutralized as business challenges that affect end users lurking on the platform and how effectively they can be retained, then it becomes easier for Meta to retain any user that enters their platforms and gain an effective attention monopoly without needing to continue to buy apps that could otherwise succeed theirs.
And so, it is in their benefit to give away their models 'for free', 'speed up' the industry's development efforts in general, de-risk other companies surpassing their efforts, etc.