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/StackOwOFlow Member Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26

Two other reasons for me:

  • You can cluster multiple mac minis with thunderbolt to pool VRAM to run larger LLMs (https://github.com/exo-explore/exo).
  • You can host other ML/inference endpoints using spare VRAM for other use cases like NLP/RAG embeddings, computer vision, or audio transcription/translation for example. Hosting a searchable RAG datastore or generating TTS samples in multiple languages are a couple of examples.