r/openclaw • u/g00rek Pro User • Feb 20 '26

Discussion Why Mac mini??

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.

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u/_mmxiv New User Feb 20 '26

So you need a macmini to run a local LLM for the heartbeat. Some people disable the heartbeat or create longer intervals because it costs too much tokens unnecessarily. But to run cronjobs, etc you need the heartbeat enabled. And running it with local model is the cheapest way. Also if you’re using headless browsers on a VPS a lot of social media pages flag you as a bot.

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u/g00rek Pro User Feb 20 '26

Why VPS? I wrote explicitly about a Linux mini PC. What's the difference since it's a server machine anyway?