Cheapest Mac to run DeepSeek V4 Flash
284B parameters (13B active) · quality index 44 · coding 60 · every Apple Silicon Mac ever sold, compared. It is a mixture-of-experts model: all 284B parameters must sit in memory, but only 13B compute per token, which is why it is faster than dense models of similar size.
The cheapest Mac that runs DeepSeek V4 Flash comfortably is a used Mac Studio M3 Ultra 32c/80c 256GB (2025) at about $5,887 EST. on the used market — running Q4_K_M quantization at roughly 52 tok/s with up to 533K tokens of context.
Every Mac that runs it, by used price
| Machine | Used price | Runs at | Est. speed | Max context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Studio M3 Ultra 32c/80c 256GB (2025) | $5,887 EST. | Q4_K_M | 52 tok/s | 533K tokens |
| Mac Studio M3 Ultra 32c/80c 512GB (2025) | $7,457 EST. | Q8_0 | 29 tok/s | 1.0M tokens |
Run it
ollama run deepseek-v4:flash pulls the default (≈Q4) build once you have Ollama installed.
Or skip the hardware
Cloud APIs serve DeepSeek V4 Flash at about $0.196 per million output tokens. The main site's break-even solver computes the daily usage where owning a Mac becomes cheaper than renting.
Open the interactive guide — speed simulator, TCO, all 75 machines →