The new MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021) laptops are packing some seriously powerful hardware. Are they too enticing for cryptominers?
The new MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021) laptops are now official, and they are some seriously strong candidates for the best laptops ever made if Apple’s claims about their performance hold up under testing. The biggest gain over the Apple M1 chip is a doubling of the performance cores from four to eight, but also the doubling and quadrupling of the GPU cores from eight at its highest in the MacBook Pro 13-inch (2020) to 16 cores in the M1 Pro chip and up to 32 in the M1 Max chip. With that kind of potential GPU performance, somewhere, cryptomining operators are turning their heads and running multivariable algebra to try and calculate the profitability of mining cryptocurrency, especially Ether, on a GPU as powerful as Apple claims. There are a lot of things that go into cryptomining profitability, from the energy cost to run a rig to the price of the equipment to the current price for a given currency. And given the seriously premium price tag of the most powerful MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021) laptops, which can go as high as $3,500 / £3,300 / AU$5,250, we would normally tell you that you have nothing to worry about if you’re hoping to get your hands on one of these premium pieces of kit. All that said, we can easily imagine a world where the stars align and suddenly we find ourselves reading about warehouses full of MacBook Pro laptops burning themselves out by mining a digital currency all day and all night long. It’s not something that anyone should consider a likely scenario, but combining the apparent power of the new M1 Pro and M1 Max GPUs, never say never. If anyone said a couple of years ago that we’d be seriously having a conversation about the potential for new MacBook Pro models being impressed into the crypto mines to burn away 24 hours a day, seven days a week to create a speculative digital asset, we’d have laughed you out of the room. MacBook Pro devices have always been plenty powerful, but nothing on the scale of the best graphics cards like the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090, currently the reigning champions of Ether mining.
