Cheapest Mac to run Qwen3-Coder 480B
480B parameters (35B active) · quality index 39 · coding 69 · every Apple Silicon Mac ever sold, compared. It is a mixture-of-experts model: all 480B parameters must sit in memory, but only 35B compute per token, which is why it is faster than dense models of similar size.
The cheapest Mac that runs Qwen3-Coder 480B comfortably is a used Mac Studio M3 Ultra 32c/80c 512GB (2025) at about $7,457 EST. on the used market — running Q5_K_M quantization at roughly 16 tok/s with up to 147K 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 512GB (2025) | $7,457 EST. | Q5_K_M | 16 tok/s | 147K tokens |
Run it
ollama run qwen3-coder:480b pulls the default (≈Q4) build once you have Ollama installed.
Or skip the hardware
Cloud APIs serve Qwen3-Coder 480B at about $1.2 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 →