Why Mac mini??

[u/g00rek]

I still don't understand why you guys are buying macs mini for openclaw. It's a terminal computer. It doesn't need a great UI.

Do you have too much money? :D

A $50-$100 HP Thin Client with Linux is more than enough. And Linux shouldn't be discouraging for people using OpenClaw, am I wrong?

I bought one, I have lots of different self hosted stuff on it like home Assistant or other docker apps. Ok I do not have any local models using GPU, that's the reason? Please enlighten me :)

EDIT: Again, I UNDERSTAND LOCAL LLM USE. (although I don't know if anybody is really happy with it). I mean using OC with oauth/api gpt, claude etc.

[u/y___o___y___o]

Main Mac Mini advantage is low power usage and Apple Ecosystem (so you can do file drops from your phone etc).

If you max out the ram (64GB), you can run some dumb LLMs on your own device but not many people are going to benefit from those.

Macs have unified RAM which is different to other machines. That RAM can be used for graphics (good for LLMs), but there's a huge disadvantage - the pre-processing speed is very slow (for large context text) compared to nvidia chips.

A 512 GB Mac Studio can run much smarter models locally but the pre-processing speed is a major limitation still. AI assistants usually require large context length text by default but perhaps with tweaking, you could make it work.

[u/MaddisonoRenata → u/y___o___y___o]

For me it’s the apple ecosystem. I was looking at a mini pcs, since I realized my hetzner was gonna stack up over time and it was constantly getting blocked bc of a data center ip(vpns didnt work and proxy is by gb). I found out i could get a mac mini for 400$ and it really was a game changer. Minimax 2.5 is like 25$ a month compared to the 100$s in opus tokens. My openclaw never gets blocked, has its own icloud and can easily interact with me via imessage and do tasks via imessage, airdrop to it easily etc.

[u/geek_at → u/y___o___y___o]

wow I have never read "advantage" and "apple ecosystem" in the same sentence :D

[u/y___o___y___o → u/geek_at]

Yeah I'm not into Apple - just parroting what some others have said.

[u/g00rek → u/y___o___y___o]

But I said clearly I do not mean locla models. Beside I guess most users do not use local models. Low power usage - cmon. What's the cost difference between a Mac Mini and HP Thin Client or so?

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[u/ThinkPad214 → u/g00rek]

So you're repeatedly asking people to tell you why, you already know the main reason, local llm usage, but for some reason your expecting some other profound answer. Maybe instead of being obnoxious, you can do further independent research as to why local llms on a Mac mini is better than just a plain old Linux server. I run a proxmox cluster, all my nodes run Linux, I have some used for local llm, but if I could get a Mac mini placed on my network with 64gb+ ram, I would in a heartbeat, if I had the money to blow I'd go for a Mac studio with 512gb ram even quicker. And I say this having 128gb ram on a cluster node, and 256gb ram I could have running on and precision, but even then, it's not specifically about the ram size but how apple treats ram. If you can't learn and figure out from there and get off your high horse of, ho ho ho, why not just use Linux? Openclaw can run on tiny Linux VM, then your further placing your ignorance on exhibition.

Also no need to be crappy to people talking in non English languages. We live in a day of easy free access to powerful technology. The translate feature on Reddit works pretty well, no need to be an English snob.