Apple has a blog post about optimizing Muse Spark Open and two other models to run natively on Apple Silicon Macs. It’s kind of interesting, but it’s worth noting that the other two models (Mistral Medium 3.5 and Qwen 3.8) are the only ones that can run on a single Mac Studio.
Muse Spark Open would require a whopping 1.6 terabytes of RAM at its native precision (BF16) for the 800+ billion parameters alone. So Apple worked with Meta to optimize and tune it, and if you run it with 4-bit quantized precision (NVFP4), you can reduce the memory requirement down to… 493GB. That’s just for the model. There are other overheads involved in running it and for macOS itself, so a single Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM can’t run it. I’ll remind you that the 512GB Mac Studio with M5 Ultra isn’t even out yet and is expected to cost at least $15,000 and probably a little more.
you need two Mac Studios with 512 GB of RAM to run Muse Spark Open, connected via their Thunderbolt ports and running the new MLX framework for distributed computing on multiple Macs. You could get away with three Mac Studios with 256 GB, Apple doesn’t say.
So yes, you can run Meta’s latest open-weight model “right from your desktop,” as Apple says, as long as your desktop has more than $30,000 worth of Mac Studio hardware.
