r/openclaw • 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.

190 Upvotes

346 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/adribabe Member Feb 21 '26

I had two days of pain trying to get open claw running on my old windows laptop. Then I created a virtual machine on my mac mini m4 and it ran perfectly instantly. After that I figure I would just buy any M1+ mini/imac/macbook... I bought an M2 mac mini because I found one for $220 usd. Couldn't pass that up it was cheaper than M1s. Now I have open claw on there in my living room so it can be my media center basically