Cheapest Mac to run Mixtral 8x7B
46.7B parameters (12.9B active) · quality index 14 · coding 8 · every Apple Silicon Mac ever sold, compared. It is a mixture-of-experts model: all 46.7B parameters must sit in memory, but only 12.9B compute per token, which is why it is faster than dense models of similar size.
The cheapest Mac that runs Mixtral 8x7B comfortably is a used Mac Studio M1 Max 10c/24c 64GB (2022) at about $1,475 EST. on the used market — running Q6_K quantization at roughly 20 tok/s with up to 32K tokens of context.
Every Mac that runs it, by used price
| Machine | Used price | Runs at | Est. speed | Max context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Studio M1 Max 10c/24c 64GB (2022) | $1,475 EST. | Q6_K | 20 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac Studio M2 Max 12c/30c 64GB (2023) | $1,499 EST. | Q6_K | 20 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac mini M4 Pro 14c/20c 48GB (2024) | $1,539 EST. | Q4_K_M | 18 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac Studio M1 Max 10c/32c 64GB (2022) | $1,598 EST. | Q6_K | 20 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac Studio M2 Max 12c/38c 64GB (2023) | $1,624 EST. | Q6_K | 20 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac mini M4 Pro 14c/20c 64GB (2024) | $1,693 EST. | Q6_K | 14 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac Studio M2 Max 12c/38c 96GB (2023) | $1,874 EST. | Q8_0 | 14 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac Studio M4 Max 16c/40c 48GB (2025) | $1,883 EST. | Q4_K_M | 35 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| MacBook Pro M1 Max 10c/32c 64GB (2021) | $1,979 EST. | Q6_K | 20 tok/s | 32K tokens |
| Mac Studio M4 Max 16c/40c 64GB (2025) | $2,040 EST. | Q6_K | 27 tok/s | 32K tokens |
See all 37 machines, other price bases, and live currency conversion →
Run it
ollama run mixtral:8x7b pulls the default (≈Q4) build once you have Ollama installed.
Or skip the hardware
Cloud APIs serve Mixtral 8x7B at about $0.24 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 →