Can You Mine Ethereum on an Apple M1 Mac? A Hands‑On Test and Results

Mining cryptocurrencies is most profitable on high‑end graphics cards, and the recent surge in virtual‑currency prices has even pushed some struggling internet cafés to repurpose their machines for mining. Enthusiasts, however, often experiment with newer hardware such as Apple’s M1‑based Macs.

Software engineer Yifan Gu (Zensors) successfully compiled and ran an Ethereum miner on his M1 MacBook Air, publishing the source at https://github.com/gyf304/ethminer-m1. His final verdict was that the setup is “not very useful.”

Preparing the Environment

Running the upstream ethminer binary on macOS ARM fails with the error “Unrecognized platform Apple” and “No usable mining devices found.” To make the Apple GPU visible to the miner, the following steps are required:

Add the Apple GPU to Ethereum’s whitelist, pretending it is an Intel GPU.

Update Boost to a version that no longer uses the obsolete -fcoalesce-templates flag.

Patch the Boost ASIO code to be compatible with the newer clang compiler.

Upgrade OpenSSL to the latest release to support the darwin‑arm64 target.

After applying these patches and rebuilding, the miner reports a hash rate of about 2 Mh/s on the M1 GPU.

Sample Build Output

ethminer 0.19.0-17+commit.ce52c740.dirty

Build: darwin/release/appleclang

i 19:51:36          Configured pool eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:9999

i 19:52:26          0:00 A0 184.16 Kh - cl0 184.16

i 19:52:31          0:00 A0 1.96 Mh - cl0 1.96

The log shows the miner connecting to a Nanopool server, generating the DAG, and eventually reporting a stable 1.9–2.0 Mh/s.

Results and Comparison

At roughly 2 Mh/s, the M1 yields about 1 RMB (≈ 0.14 USD) per day—hardly enough to justify the effort. By contrast, even a low‑end Nvidia mining card can achieve 26 Mh/s, delivering an order of magnitude higher earnings. The primary difference stems from power consumption: Nvidia GPUs draw significantly more power, which translates into higher hash rates.

Other developers have also tried mining on M1 hardware; for example, XMrig was adapted to mine Monero shortly after the M1’s release. Nonetheless, the consensus is that the M1’s integrated GPU is not a competitive mining solution.

Future Outlook

Apple’s upcoming 128‑core GPU, intended to replace AMD GPUs in future Macs, may close the performance gap, but until then the M1 is better suited for everyday tasks than for serious cryptocurrency mining.