Apple has a blog post about optimizing Muse Spark Open and two other models to run natively on Apple Silicon Macs. It’s interesting stuff, 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 in its native precision (BF16) just for the 800+ billion parameters alone. So Apple worked with Meta to optimize and tune it, and if you run it at a quantized 4-bit precision (NVFP4) you can get the memory requirement all the way down to… 493GB. That’s just for the model. There’s other overhead involved in actually 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 is not even out yet, and is expected to cost at least $15,000 and probably quite a bit more.
You need two Mac Studios with 512GB of RAM to run Muse Spark Open, connected via their Thunderbolt ports and running the new MLX framework for distributed computing over multiple Macs. You might get away with three Mac Studios with 256GB, Apple doesn’t say.
So yeah, you can run the latest open-weights model from Meta “right from your desk” as Apple says, provided your desk has over $30,000 of Mac Studio hardware on it.
