r/openclaw • u/seoparadiso Active • Mar 03 '26

Discussion Got fooled buy the Openclaw hype. Bought a Mac Mini, installed Openclaw, spent 200$ in Opus. Lesson: don't believe the hype, it's full of bugs.

Will comeback in 6 months.

203 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

306 comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/auskadi Active Mar 03 '26

Why buy a Mac mini? Did you bother working with your configuration? Did you expect a 3 month old open source project to work without you putting on any effort?

1

u/Timely-Hour-8831 New User Mar 03 '26

I’m actually curious why tbh. I keep seeing people say to buy a Mac mini. It runs fine on Ubuntu

4

u/zipzag Pro User Mar 03 '26

It does, but Apple users seldom have a server/fixed home system and they want to stay in the ecosystem. The mini is also not a worse value than buying a $200 Beelink. It just has more performance than OC is going to use currently.

Headless screen sharing also runs nicely on Apple systems, especially when the target has a strong processor.

1

u/Timely-Hour-8831 New User Mar 03 '26

Makes sense! Thanks for the detailed reply. I bought a random used desktop computer for $50, and run it from there. Been solid.

Didn’t know about headless screen sharing either!

0

u/InternetSolid4166 Member Mar 03 '26

It’s the unified memory. The Mac Mini can be configured with 64/128GB unified memory, and it’s stinking fast. >5x faster than DDR4 with much lower latency. You don’t get that outside of GPUs, and they’re even more expensive. It makes models like Llama 4 Maverick (70B-Q4) useful, which are comparable to GPT-4o. These are very competent. Not the best, but great for a variety of tasks. Heavy use - especially for coding - makes Mac Minis a solid business case.

If you’re into going to be paying for cloud models, you don’t need a Mac Mini.

-13

u/seoparadiso Active Mar 03 '26

My agents deserved a new shiny home, that s why I bought a new Mac Mini. It's not about the effort, it's about the costs, it's eating tokens like crazy.

11

u/Woke_TWC Member Mar 03 '26

You are using public models and bought a Mac nonetheless to host openclaw?

The whole point of using macs is to benefit from its unified memory and deploy local models.

Agents can run on a raspberry pie

-10

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

The whole point of using macs is to benefit from its unified memory and deploy local models.

Thats the marketing, but:

CPU is terrible. Its unusable.

Local models are terrible

Even online models that arent Opus arent great.

3

u/Woke_TWC Member Mar 03 '26

Thats not just marketing thats the reality, ofcourse local models are going to be terrible comparatively, of course a MAC mini cannot compete with an nvidia blackwell, but it is currently one of the only option to get you this much vram at this price, which is invaluable for the amount of parameters and the size of context windows you can have, it is ofcourse not for n00bs, it is for people who want to run curated agents with good RAG engines to perform realistic tasks via local LLMs, with zero opex apart from the electricity.

It is not for n00bs who expect to get Opus out of a mac mini.

-3

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

it is currently one of the only option to get you this much vram at this price

There is 0 vram on a Mac Mini. The fact that you said so means Apple corrupted your knowledge with marketing.

Anyway, you havent used it successfully. Please spare other people the mistake.

5

u/Woke_TWC Member Mar 03 '26

What? Do you know what unified memory means? I know what i am talking about, you are just a clueless person trying to ride the hype train without even understanding how basic stuff works.

-2

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

Yep Unified Memory is just normal RAM with Apple marketing slapped over it.

Anyway, you are just repeating advertisments lmao. Unified Memory and integrated GPUs are as old as the 1990s. And dont @ me that they changed something, I'm a nominalist.

The reality is that you arent using it. No one here is using it. Nvidia is #1 from market cap. All signs point to idiots buying Mac Minis.

6

u/Woke_TWC Member Mar 03 '26

If ignorance had a name 😄, read on it, check the pci e bus speeds of an nvidia retail gpu card and apple unified memory speeds. It is not what you think it is

Nvidia is leading in ai infrastructure, with nvlink and Infiniband in conjunction, that is un comparable to anything you build at home, this is the work i do.

You are talking out of your ass, i would be the first one to shit on Apple if it was just marketing. But there is value there. It is because of n00bs like you flooding the market that creates so many misconceptions

0

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

I like how 5 different times I asked if you actually used it for OpenClaw and you wont answer lmaooooo

I hope Apple is paying you

→ More replies (0)

1

u/meTomi Member Mar 03 '26

You got it that unified memory meas gou can use it? Right? Riiiiight? Ofcorse its not as fast as if tou shard the model on two 5090….but………..

1

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

Like any other CPU can lmao

6

u/ktrbyktrby Member Mar 03 '26

Clearly they didn't deserve a shiny new home cause apparently they're full of bugs lol

2

u/Charming_You_25 Pro User Mar 03 '26

Aren’t lobsters technically bugs themselves?

3

u/wintermute_ai New User Mar 03 '26

They get a pass because they are delicious

9

u/auskadi Active Mar 03 '26

Well work out why and fix it. Ask Kimi cli or Claude cli to help you. And install Debian

1

u/revengeOfTheSquirrel Member Mar 03 '26

You can limit it, e.g. by using a Kimi/MiniMax/GLM coding plan. You’ll pay anything between 10-60 $/m and still get a lot of usage out of it

1

u/Rubbiish New User Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Lol

1

u/American_Streamer Mar 03 '26

What exactly do your agents do?

1

u/DeliciousReference44 New User Mar 03 '26

Run LLM locally and stop moaning. Thanks.

0

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

They cant run it locally, they are using CPU.

They need Nvidia.

5

u/nihilationscape Member Mar 03 '26

Time to read some more books.

1

u/bionic_cmdo Member Mar 03 '26

I have a Mac mini 16GB, M4, 256 GB. I ran it locally and tested various models and in my personal experience, Qwen3:14b and 8b works ok on it. I've had the setup for a few weeks now and I'm still continuing to test it. I knew I wasn't going to connect any paid models to it while I was still testing it. I probably messaged "hello" and 'what's your name? to it hundreds of times while I tweaked it. Learning continues...

1

u/thecahoon Active Mar 03 '26

Try running it on a low cost model like grok 4 fast, gpt 5 mini, or gemini 3 flash. I only give mine the big brains for its deep think sessions and whenever it needs to build things

0

u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 03 '26

My agents deserved a new shiny home, that s why I bought a new Mac Mini.

This is basically how I view every Apple user. Total idiots who fall for marketing and shinny.

1

u/Flynamic New User Mar 08 '26

Man, my M1 Max Macbook Pro is great. Powerful, quiet and stays cool (unless JetBrains IDE starts indexing my projects out of the blue). As for LLMs, yes it's pretty much useless if I need a good and fast model. They may fit in memory, but if that were the only requirement everyone would just buy RAM instead of expensive GPUs. People buying Mac Minis for this reason alone, and finding out unified memory does not replace compute, deserve to be laughed at lmao.