Guide · Live data

What an Apple Silicon Mac actually earns mining crypto

Benchmarks + live profitability · updated 13 September 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 uses well — and it will earn coffee money, not rent money. (Pasiv mines Monero on the CPU, paid out in USDT.) 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 power draw, so you can judge whether it's worth it on your own tariff.

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 uses for its in-app estimate: price × block reward ÷ network difficulty.

Snapshot from 13 September 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 live Monero 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.

What these numbers are

Every figure on this page is gross — at today's price and difficulty, before your pool's fee and before 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; what that costs is a function of your tariff, so we leave that sum to you rather than print a number that is true for one reader and wrong for the next.

Put next to the earnings table, the honest framing is: a machine that is on anyway, and coins you want to hold. Coffee money, not cash flow.

Getting the most out of the hardware

• Mine continuously, not in bursts. The rate above moves week to week with price and difficulty; what you earn is that rate times the hours the machine is actually mining, so a Mac left running overnight beats one started for ten minutes at a time.
• 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. The pool pays your own address directly — in USDT by default since Pasiv 0.5.0 (Pasiv is non-custodial). Pasiv's fee is 4% of mining time, and it only accrues while actively mining (on the older direct route, on Monero only). Fees that aren't Pasiv's: the pool's (unMineable's 0.75%, from which it pays Pasiv a 0.25% referral, not from your earnings; ~1% on a direct-route pool) and the bundled XMRig engine's 1% developer donation.

Methodology

Monero uses RandomX, so one validated RandomX hashrate per chip is all the maths needs, 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 (13 September 2026) and says so. Hashrates come from validated runs in the public XMRig benchmark database. No affiliate links, no sponsored coins.

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