They recommend a Mac Mini because it’s the cheapest device that can access your Apple reminders and iMessage. If you are into that ecosystem obviously.
If you don’t need any of that then any device or small VPS instance will suffice.
If you don’t need any of that then any device or small VPS instance will suffice.
It's very difficult to get this much memory on a graphics card.
If you look at the videos and blog posts where they recommend getting a Mac Mini for this are recommending the base model (which comes with just 16GB), precisely because it’s the cheapest Mac that can read your reminders, use iMessage etc. that’s what those using OpenClaw want from the Mini, not its inference capabilities.
On a 64 GB Apple silicon Mac mini you can natively host mid sized and some larger quantised local models .. using Ollama.
For example:
Qwen3-Coder (32B), GLM-4.7 (or GLM-4 Variants), Devstral-24B / Mistral Large (Quantized)