I'm also not a fan of Apple, mainly due to its closeness and relatively high prices, but after considering the price of comparable machines with Nvidia and the noise and power consumption, I bought a M1 Ultra for my local AI experiments. The Apple machine can run most of the models I need (not just LLMs), and it's very quiet, probably doesn't consume much power, although it can be slower than using CUDA, and you often need to tweak the code a bit to run on Apple Silicon. Overall I think it's not a bad investment, no buyer's remorse.