Hi Jason,
I’ll put myself in your shoes and evaluate the situation:
1. Timing. RTX Spark machines ship Fall 2026, likely mid-way through or after your 6-month gap. The DGX Spark is available now.
2. Price. Nothing official yet; Morgan Stanley estimates put N1 systems at roughly $1,799+ and flagship N1X configs near $2,899
3. Fit for your workload. Training small linear modules (transcoders/probes) over MLP hidden states is memory-capacity-hungry, not decode-bandwidth-hungry. I think the Spark is suited to that. Honest caveat: absolute training throughput sits below an A100 40GB (training on Spark), and for big batch training runs the community consensus is renting H200/GH200 on Lambda/RunPod is cheaper and faster (2 vs 3-4 node).
So: if the gap starts soon and you need CUDA daily, a DGX Spark now (keep the MBP, SSH into it) or cloud rentals are your real options. If you can wait until fall and want one machine that replaces the MBP, a 128 GB N1X laptop is worth watching, but it’s not released yet, so I wouldn’t plan a research gap around it.
some other links: