Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

> Look how many people bought Minis and ended up just paying for API calls anyway. (Saw it IRL 2x, see it on reddit openclaw daily)

Aren't the OpenClaw enjoyers buying Mac Minis because it's the cheapest thing which runs macOS, the only platform which can programmatically interface with iMessage and other Apple ecosystem stuff? It has nothing to do with the hardware really.

Still, buying a brand new Mac Mini for that purpose seems kind of pointless when a used M1 model would achieve the same thing.

View on HN

It’s exactly that. They are buying the base model just for that. You are not going to do much local AI with those 16GB of ram anyway, it could be useful for small things but the main purpose of the Mini is being able to interact with the apple apps and services.

No one is buying a base model Mac for local LLM. Everyone is forgetting the PC prices have drastically increased due to RAM and SSD. Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change… at least for the models that didn’t just drop today. Mac’s are just a good deal at the moment.

the new models cost $200 more for each 8GB of Ram you add.. Ouch...

That's been the case for years. Not new to the M5's

> Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change

Yeah because Mac upgrade prices were already sky high, long before the component shortage. 32GB of DDR5-6000 for a PC rocketed from $100 to $500, while the cost of adding 16GB to a Mac was and still is $400.

I'm kind of curious how Apple's supply contracts actually work, because it's currently more attractive to buy a Mac with a lot of RAM than it usually is, relative to a PC. So if it's "we negotiated a price and you give us as much RAM as we sell machines" the company supplying the RAM is getting soaked because they're having to supply even more RAM to Apple for a below-market price.

But if the contract was for a specific amount of RAM and then people start coming to Apple more for high RAM machines, they're going to exhaust their contract sooner than usual and run out of cheap memory to buy. Then they have to decide if they want to lower their margins or raise the already-high price up to nosebleed levels.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/memory-supply-chain-ai-disrup...

  Apple has accepted a 100% price increase for Samsung's LPDDR5X memory, with DRAM supply commitments secured only through the first half of 2026. Tim Cook acknowledged during the Q1 FY2026 earnings call that storage price increases would significantly impact Q2 gross margins.. Apple is evaluating ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) as new supply sources, attempting to rebuild pricing leverage through supply chain diversification.

16GB should be enough for TTS/Voice models running locally no ? I was thinking about having a home assistant setup like that where the voice is local and the brain is API based

Sure, that’s why I said maybe it’s useful for a few things. But the main reason people were recommending the Mini was for its price (base model) and having access to the Apple services for clawdbot to leverage. Not precisely for local AI.

I run ministral for my home knowledge database on 24G iMac and some other non-agentic LLM things.

> Aren't the OpenClaw enjoyers buying Mac Minis because it's the cheapest thing which runs macOS

That's likely only part of the reason. Mac Mini is now "cheap" because everyone exploded in price. RAM and SSD etc have all gone up massively. Not the mention Mac mini is easy out of the box experience.

It's not cheap, though. Two weeks ago I bought a computer with a similar form factor (GMKtec G10). Worse CPU and GPU but same 16GB memory and a larger SSD for 40% the price of a base mac mini ($239 vs $599). It came with Windows preinstalled, but I immediately wiped that to install linux. Even a used (M-series) mac mini is substantially more expensive. It will cost me about an extra penny per day in electricity costs over a mac mini, but I won't be alive long enough for the mac mini to catch up on that metric.

I considered the mac mini at the time, but the mac mini only makes sense if you need the local processing power or the apple ecosystem integration. It's certainly not cheaper if you just need a small box to make API calls and do minimal local processing.

> It came with Windows preinstalled, but I immediately wiped that to install linux.

Do you really need Openclaw now? And not claude code + zapier or Claude code + cron?

That's the point. If you have worse CPU and GPU Windows will be sluggish (it's bloated).

If you need the CPU power in the Mac Mini then it is a pretty good price-to-performance ratio.

It's cheap for what you get.

If you just need "a small box to make API calls and do minimal local processing" you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10.

All 3 serve a different purpose; just because you can buy a slower machine for less doesn't mean the price:performance of the M1 Mac Mini changes.

> you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10.

Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which feels like a more true price since it's including power supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb by itself is $135.

A 16gb pi5 kit, to match just the RAM capacity to say nothing of the difference in storage {size, speed, quality} and networking, is then also an eye watering $300

>Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which feels like a more true price since it's including power supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb by itself is $135.

At that point buy a used macbook air m1.

>you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price

lol. you need to look at rpi 5 prices again. they are insane.

That’s a big “if” at the end. You can always make a computer cheaper “if” you strip down what you need to do with it.

The Mac mini strangely is and has been a very good deal for years now.

There are so few used Mac Mini around, those are all gone and what is left is to buy new.

Worse than that, they hold their value, so buying a used M1 mini is still a few hundred bucks, and saving $200-300 by purchasing a 5 generation older mini seems like a bad deal in comparison.

Someone came to be excited they got a "deal" on the newest Intel Mac Mini for hosting OpenClaw. 8GB model for $300. I kind of regret bursting their bubble by telling them you can walk over to Costco (nearest one at time of discussion was walking distance) and pay $550 for one with an M4 and 16GB of RAM.

Up until a week ago, the base m4 mini (16gb ram/256gb ssd) was $399 at microcenter, now $499. Pretty shocking how good of a value that is IMO.

Damn. Would be awesome to network a bunch over thunderbolt.

That’s just somebody not doing their research and overpaying unfortunately

Just like with GPUs and Bitcoin they'll be a flood of old hardware on the market eventually.

Depends on what you mean by “eventually”

Bro. The used M1 mini and studio are all gone. I was thinking of buying one for local AI before openclaw came out and went back to look and the order book is near empty. Swappa is cleared out. eBay is to the point that the m1 studio is selling for at least a thousand more.

This arb you’re talking about doesn’t exist. An m1 studio with 64 gb was $1300 prior to openclaw. You’re not getting that today.

I would have preferred that too since I could Asahi it later. It’s just not cheap any more. The m4 is flat $500 at microcenter.

Can't they simply run MacOS on a VM on existing Mac hardware?

You aren’t going to run a network connected 24/7 online agent from a laptop because it’s battery powered and portable.

Not if you want it to be able to use the hardware identifiers to register for use with iMessage.

Not true as of macOS 15 onwards [1].

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/usi...

I have it running in a macos VM using lume & BlueBubbles on a throwaway iCloud account. A lot of hoops to jump through, though

https://cua.ai/docs/lume https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/bluebubbles

yes, and its funny that all these critical people dont know this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com