Guide · Live data

What an Apple Silicon Mac actually earns mining crypto

Benchmarks + live profitability · updated 24 July 2026 · numbers below refresh from live market data

Short version: a modern Mac is a genuinely competent CPU miner — Apple Silicon runs the RandomX algorithm (Monero, Zephyr, Salvium) well — and it will earn coffee money, not rent money. This page gives you the real numbers most mining sites won't: validated per-chip hashrates, profitability computed live from current prices and network difficulty, and the electricity math that decides whether it's worth it for you.

Live: what 1 kH/s earns right now

Computed in your browser from public data — CoinGecko prices and pool network stats — using the same formula Pasiv's Auto mode uses: price × block reward ÷ network difficulty.

Snapshot from 24 July 2026 — live refresh loading…

Per-chip hashrates and earnings

Hashrates are from validated community submissions to the official XMRig benchmark database (RandomX, all cores), rounded; real-world results vary with thread count, RAM config, and thermals. Earnings use the best live coin rate above and update with it.

★ The M4 Max range includes our own measured run: 7,022 H/s with XMRig 250K-hash bench, 14 threads, stock settings, 24 July 2026. Chips without enough validated public benchmarks (base M3/M4, Ultras) are omitted rather than guessed — Pasiv shows your machine's real measured hashrate within a minute of starting.

The honest part: electricity

An Apple Silicon Mac under all-core load typically draws on the order of 25–60 W of package power depending on the chip (one of the best performance-per-watt profiles of any consumer CPU — a desktop mining rig draws 5–20× more). At an electricity price of $0.15/kWh, 40 W running 24/7 costs about $0.14/day.

Put next to the earnings table, that means:

• On cheap power, solar, or included-in-rent power, an M-class Mac mines at a small but real profit — more on the bigger chips.
• On expensive power (>$0.25/kWh), CPU mining is roughly break-even to slightly negative. Then the honest reason to run it is accumulating coins you want (many people mine Monero for the asset, not the margin) — not cash flow.
• A machine that's on anyway — a desktop working days, a Mac mini home server — has already paid its idle power overhead; mining's marginal cost is the delta, which flatters the math.

Getting the most out of the hardware

• Mine the right coin, continuously. The spread between the best and worst coin above is real and moves week to week. Pasiv's opt-in Auto / Max-Profit mode re-ranks supported coins every 15 minutes on live data and keeps your machine on the winner, switching only past a clear margin.
• Stay plugged in. On battery the governor deliberately backs off; sustained mining is a plugged-in activity.
• Give it air. RandomX is memory-and-cache heavy; a throttling chip mines slower. A stand or open desk placement is enough for most Macs.
• Direct payouts, fees in the open. Pools pay your address directly (Pasiv is non-custodial). Pasiv's fee is 4% of mining time, only while actively mining. Two fees aren't ours and never reach Pasiv: your pool's ~1% and the bundled XMRig engine's 1% developer donation.

Methodology

Because Monero, Zephyr, and Salvium all use RandomX, one machine produces the same hashrate on each, so profitability compares directly and block time cancels out. Prices come from CoinGecko, difficulty and average block reward from public pool APIs (HeroMiners), fetched by your browser when you load this page; if the fetch fails, the page shows its last editorial snapshot (24 July 2026) and says so. Hashrates come from validated runs in the public XMRig benchmark database. No affiliate links, no sponsored coins.

Frequently asked questions