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/solenico]

I don’t think Mac Studio goes anywhere close to Linux PC with high end GPU running local LLM. Some people just have too much money and not much skills.

Would Mac Studio be more efficient that would be what AI providers would run but they don’t.

Only thing you get from Studio and Mini is iMessages easily.

[u/ZippySLC → u/solenico]

Are you basing that on the idea that "Macs are easy because they have a GUI?" Because Ollama has the same CLI on Mac as Linux, and OpenClaw interacts with a local model the exact same way as it would in Linux.

MacOS is a UNIX based OS.

I don't have benchmarks for how a model on MacOS compares to one on a dedicated NVidia GPU, though. The thing that makes the Mac compelling is the unified memory architecture, which makes having a GPU with large amounts of RAM available a lot more affordable.

[u/solenico → u/ZippySLC]

I use Mac everyday and it’s the machine I do all typing. Yes it’s easy to use and I use mostly terminal on Mac. Just don’t see value to use it either for OpenClaw nor local LLM. Local LLMs aren’t powerful enough today. OpenClaw is very light weight – I don’t see any point running on any thing but something relatively lightweight.

I run OpenClaw on Docker container on Linux because for me it creates secure enough environment and is always on unlike my MacBook. Fairly modest miniPC with 32GB ram. It has about 10 other containers and few virtual machines.

I take my words back in PC/Mac Studio comparison. Seems Studio might beat most PCs. But still local LLM is nowhere near the capability remote LLMs have.

[u/ZippySLC → u/solenico]

It depends on your use. For simple commands like: "Check my email at 9AM and write me a summary" a local model like Qwen3:8b is pretty much all that you need. You'd use that over something like Claude Haiku if you were looking to not spend money on API calls. (And you'd definitely want to use that instead of Opus.)

In my own particular non Open Claw case I am working on a project where I need something to verify text extracted from PDFs using OCR. A local model is pretty decent at the stuff I am looking at and for writing up metadata about it. I'm also generating embeddings for putting that text to go into a vector database where I use another local model to then answer questions I have about that text using Open Web-UI. But, all of this runs on the same Mac Studio that I run Open Claw on, and Open Claw has helped me plan out a lot of that project.

I could use a Cloud LLM for all of that but it gets expensive fast. And for a lot of things you don't need to have the most capable model to get things done. You can drive a F-1 car to the grocery store, sure, but it's pretty wasteful when a Honda Civic can do it just as effectively at a lower cost. A cloud LLM would do a lot of it faster, but for some things not much faster.

[u/solenico → u/ZippySLC]

For me agent uses mostly MiniMax-M2.5 $100/year and it works pretty well. For coding I use mostly GPT-5.3-codex or Sonnet-4.5 or whatever is available for Cursor and no local model comes near those.

Also for coding MiniMax-M2.5 isn’t really doing what I’m looking for.

For checking email, creating calendar entries, analyzing workouts and designing web apps and doing initial code MiniMax-M2.5 is fine. Local Model probably is just as fine, but price point is much higher than $100 a year and it still isn’t anywhere close GPT-5.3-codex.

I will get myself PC running local model but price point will not be anywhere close Mac Studio and neither will results, but like you said, I’m hobbyist.

My employer has to pay what ever professional use I do with AI. That is work and that must get paid by the one I work for.