With the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips offering huge performance increases, a question occurred to me: would mining MacBook Pro cryptocurrency be feasible? …
Some Redditors wondered the same thing.
“M1 Max could mine ETH at 55 MH/s? Memory bandwidth is between the RX 6700 XT and the RTX 3060 Ti.
“If the M1 Max can do more than 40 MH/s, I would order a MacBook Pro M1 Max instead of an M1 Pro. »
“Facts to consider: This is the most efficient SoC, it will consume much less power than a dedicated GPU. The resale value of MacBooks is the best on the market […] The SoC has several dedicated processors for specific things like screen output, super-fast video encoding, encryption, and an extremely powerful neural engine. If a world-class mining and cryptocurrency programmer got their hands on it, magical things would happen. It is both the most efficient generalized processor and the most efficient programmable ASIC.
“I have the 64GB M1 Max 16″, running in high power mode, I get ~10.25 MH/s with the ethminer-m1 stock binary. Not super fast by any means, but it’s pretty darn efficient, and the hash rate per W is probably pretty good.
Naturally, someone has already put it to the test and run the numbers. YouTuber UFD Tech tested it with the M1 Pro model, as seen in the video below.
There are already precompiled binaries for mining M1 Mac crypto, and the video explains how to install and run one. In this case, it was mining for Ethereum.
The first thing to note is that you don’t want to mine in the background! The mining application destroys machine performance for anything else, even occasional web browsing, so you would only want to do this when you are not using your Mac.
The M1 Pro machine generated just over 5Mh/s (mega hash per second), which is better considering the total power consumption of just 17W, well below what would be consumed by a Windows PC generating the same result.
Running the numbers using a crypto calculator shows that the profit, after taking into account electricity costs, is only $12.82 per month, or about 42 cents per day. If you bought the MacBook Pro just for mining, that means it would pay for itself in… 17 years!
More realistically, you’d calculate the purchase cost minus the resale value after four or five years to base it on the true cost of ownership, but that’s still peanuts anyway.
The M1 Max is expected to roughly double the mining rate, and we don’t take into account the supposed increases in the value of the mined currency, but you can see that no one will buy these as mining rigs.
Of course, if you already own one, you might decide that it’s okay to mine MacBook Pro cryptocurrency when you’re not using the machine — don’t expect to get rich!
Some have speculated that Apple could get into the cryptocurrency business, either by investing some of its excess cash, enabling crypto in the Wallet app, or even creating a hardware wallet. . Tim Cook ruled out the first of these possibilities, at least for now, but revealed that he had invested some of his own money.
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