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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

If you want iMessage you still need an always-on Mac, whether that's the main moltbot gateway, or the MacOS app running in 'node mode' to allow a moltbot gateway to use it to send/receive iMessages.

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I noticed when I was reading Federico Viticci's post about it that he was using telegram, which has much better support for "markdown"-y rendering, which looks a lot nicer than iMessage. And then I thought to myself, why would iMessage actually matter? The only other use-case would be interacting with texts, but almost anyone can tell when someone is using an LLM to text - I feel like our texting styles are so personal, and what is there even to gain from using an LLM just with text messages? So is it even worth it to run on a Mac?

I see value in the LLM being able to read/integrate my iMessages since a lot of my scheduling/commitments are discussed on there.

> need an always-on Mac

Not really, you can emulate macOS on any Linux/x86-64.

But it is actually a good point to get a Mac Mini instead of a NUC. The Mac Mini is going to deliver better performance per Watt.

Can you really register iMessage on an emulated MacOS these days? I'd love to learn more, the AIs I asked say it doesn't seem possible in VMs anymore.

I think you need to register on a real Mac (2 of 3 of my MBPs use OCLP), but then can use an emulated one if you add it to your Apple account. Either way, I don't recommend to use a protocol behind such a moat. Probably better to use Signal or Threema.

Moltbot is supposed to be a 'personal AI assistant'

with >60% market share in US, you can't really expect people to just 'not use iMessage'. It's what the messages are going to be coming in on

> Not really, you can emulate macOS on any Linux/x86-64.

Intel is going to stop being supported with the current OS version (Tahoe, 2025). OS are supported for about 3 years.

I'm curious what will happen after. If they'll break it or if they'll allow the services to keep running on unsupported hardware.

Got a couple years left

I expect someone will eventually get around to reverse engineering the various M series specific instructions for qemu. Does imessage make use of hardware attestation to register with the remote endpoint?

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