Don’t do mining with MacBooks. You will certainly regret it over time. I have first hand experience in it. I was mining with Minergate GUI in my MacBook for a while and that’s one of the stupid most thing I ever did. Don’t do it.
I totally agree with kriskarthik about not mining on Apple devices at all... unless you have some really old Macbook that you don't mind "trashing" in exchange for the knowledge...
The current line of Macbooks or MBP series are designed with aesthetics and mobility in mind rather and longevity. Im sure those MBP owners can still get their 2008 or perhaps earlier models still running even to-date (albeit very much slower and a lot of wait times) but the newer line of MBPs are a different story - really finicky and I dare say not long lasting.
I have a 2008 macbook and a late 2016 MBP Touch Bar. Both of which I sampled and tried with mining. The 2008 model with a Core Duo 2.5Ghz hashes about 20-25H/s while the 2016 MBP hashes at about 90H/s.
With the 2008 model, I've got nothing to lose since its set up to be a server and it a really old model. I also used it to learn about crypto. But while waiting for my actual rig to arrive, I got tempted to start mining on the MBP. I didn't mine for that long, perhaps about 5 days total (with a power timer to switch on and off the charging every 2.5hrs), cause the heat coming off the MBP was a concern to me. Alas, I did use it to plot my HDD for BURST mining perhaps for another week. After that, while I was working on a spreadsheet, the MBP suddenly shutdown & would not start again!
Learn from my experience ... For those on Macs or any laptop for that matter, while the idea of earning some bucks may entice you to use your lap, its really not worth the electricity and increased risks of damaging your hardware. Better get yourself a rig that is dedicated to mining - at least you have the flexibility to add more cooling aside from the obviously significant increase in hash rate
It's not even limited to just MacBooks or Apple devices for that matter, don't mine on ANY mobile devices. As mentioned before, these laptops or mobile devices don't have the cooling to be run at full utilization for long periods of time. It's much better to just save your earnings and eventually buy a rig if you wish to mine.
It is possible to mine with select threads on your CPU, but if you choose to do so then you'll be mining an amount of crypto so small it'll not be worth your time.
Thanks for your suggestion, I am mining using MacBook more to want to learn, and add my knowledge in Cryptocurrency field. Not to seek profit only. Thanks to this forum, I can gain knowledge from the masters.
Salaam Husna. With what I have said above, and if your purpose is to learn about cryptocurrency and mining, then you could look at mining cryptonight coins. I used XMR-Stak to compile and run the miner on Mac. The instructions are pretty straight forward.
You can look at how you can do that >
https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak/blob/master/doc/compile_MacOS.mdBrief instructions:
1. Install Homebrew.
a. Open Terminal (press Command + Spacebar to open spotlight; search for terminal and press Enter)
b. Type the following in terminal > /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Once homebrew is installed, go to the XMR-STAK directory and type the following step-by-step (below taken from XMR-STAK's compiling instructions)
2. brew install hwloc libmicrohttpd gcc openssl cmake
3. cmake . -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/usr/local/opt/openssl -DCUDA_ENABLE=OFF -DOpenCL_ENABLE=OFF
4. make install
After you have compiled, go to the Bin folder and run the miner with "sudo ./xmr-stak". The first time you run, the miner will ask the coins that you want to mine, the pool address, your wallet address, etc. Better have them ready.
Once that's completed, you should already be mining...
But be warned with my experience above.
