Apple is expanding its AI capabilities through a new collaboration with Meta. According to CNBC —as noted by TrendForce — the companies have announced plans to enable developers to run Meta’s Muse Spark Open model locally on Apple’s high-end Mac Studio desktops.
Meta describes Muse Spark Open as its most capable U.S. open-weight model, featuring 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion active parameters, and a 1 million-token context window. Built on a mixture-of-experts architecture, the model is designed to run locally on M5 Ultra-powered Mac Studios using Apple’s MLX framework. Each M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, allowing two connected Mac Studios to accommodate the entire model, according to Meta.
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang noted that many powerful open-weight models are too large to run on most personal computers, but the Mac Studio’s memory capacity makes running Muse Spark Open practical, according to TrendForce. Wang said the companies worked together to bring advanced agent capabilities to desktops powered by Apple’s M5 Ultra chips, as highlighted by CNBC.
However, the hardware requirements come at a high cost. According to CNBC, a Mac Studio equipped with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory starts at $10,799, while a 512GB configuration is expected later this month.
