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Comment by eleventyseven | Hacker News Reader

You know that if you are just using a cloud service and not running local models, you could have just bought a raspberry pi.

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Yeah. I know it’s dumb but it’s also a very expensive machine to run BlueBubbles, because iMessage requires a real Mac signed into an Apple ID, and I want a persistent macOS automation host with native Messages, AppleScript, and direct access to my local dev environment, not just a headless Linux box calling APIs.

Hey, I made the same decision (except I went with the 24gb model, not the 16gb). The other thing I like about having it on a separate Mac Mini is that it it's completely sandboxed, and I don't log into anything with it on my personal machine. It's VERY nice to have this as an isolated environment, and the extra VRAM means that I can run my own local models, and it's got enough beef to do long-running tasks (right now I have it chugging through several gigs of images and building embeddings for them with DINOv2) -- that's the sort of local workload that would crush a Raspberry Pi, but the Macbook is hitting 17 images per second -- all managed by OpenClaw.

All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for GPU resources in the background.

My M2 macbook pro runs qwen fine, and so will any mac mini with maxed out ram.

The only immediately available was the base 16GB version

Harder to get at the Apple ecosystem. I have an old Macbook that just serves my reminders over the internet.

who knows when Apple decides to enter the game, but they will absolutely crush the personal agent market when they do.

Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this point.

For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.

Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.

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