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> the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to

And

> Here’s what people miss about moats: they compound

Swapping an OpenAI for an Anthropic or open weight model is the opposite of compounding. It is a race to the bottom.

> Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.”

From what I hear OC is not like that at all. People are going to want a model that reliably does what you tell it to do inside of (at a minimum) the Apple ecosystem.

15 years ago or so almost everything you wanted to do on a Mac GUI already _was_ scriptable.

Shortcuts is better than nothing, but unsatisfying.

I read this less as a fumble and more as a frustrating sign of the times. Automation is not powerful because powerful automation is a maintenance and malfeasance liability only valued by a tiny minority.

It's obviously broken, so no, Apple Intelligence should not have been this.

They sell it as a concept with every single one of their showcases. They saw it.

> Or maybe they saw it and decided the risk wasn’t worth it.

They sell it as a concept with every single one of their showcases. They wanted to actually be selling it.

The reason is simple.

They failed, like all others. They couldn't sandbox it. They could have done a ghetto form of internal MCP where the AI can ONLY access emails. Or ONLY access pages in a browser when a user presses a button. And so on. But every time they tried, they never managed to sandbox it, and the agent would come out of the gates. Like everyone else did.

Including OpenClaw.

But Apple has a reputation. OpenClaw is an hyped up shitposter. OpenClaw will trailblaze and make the cool thing until it stops causing horrible failures. They will have the molts escape the buckets and ruin the computer of the tech savvy early adopters, until that fateful day when the bucket is sealed.

Then Apple will steal that bucket.

They always do.

I'm not a 40 year old whippersnapper anymore. My options were never those two.

Ten years from now, there will be no ‘agent layer’. This is like predicting Microsoft failed to capitalize on bulletin boards social media.

And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.

Right now we are still in very, very, very early days.

           people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware

Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?

which obviously apple can't do. only an indie dev launching a project with an obvious copyright violation in the name can get away with that sort of recklessness. it's super fun, but saying apple should do it now is ridiculous. this is where apple should get to eventually, once they figure out all the hard problems that moltbot simply ignores by doing the most dangerous thing possible at every opportunity.

If Apple were to ever put something like that into the hands of the masses every page on the internet would be stuffed with malicious prompts, and the phishing industry would see a revival the likes of which we can only imagine.

Are people's agents actually clicking buttons (visual computer use) or is this just a metaphor?

I'm not asking if CU exists, but rather is this literally the driver of people's workflows? I thought everyone is just running Ralph loops in CC.

For an article making such a bold technological/social claim about a trillion dollar company, this seems a strange thing to be hand wavey about.

Why is Apple's hardware being in demand for a use that undermines its non-Chinese competition a sign of missing the ball versus validation for waiting and seeing?

It sounds to me like they still have the hardware, since — according to the article — "Mac Minis are selling out everywhere." What's the problem? If anything, this is validation of their hardware differentiation. The software is easy to change, and they can always learn from OpenClaw for the next iteration of Apple Intelligence.

Reality is the exact opposite. Young, innovative, rebellions, often hyper motivated folks are sprinting from idea to implementation, while executives are “told by a few colleagues” that something new, “the future-of foo” is raising up.

If you use openclaw then that’s fantastic. If you have an idea how to improve it, well it is an open source, so go ahead, submit a pull request.

Telling Apple you should do what I am probably too lazy to do, is kind of entitlement blogging that I have nearly zero respect for.

Apparently it’s easier to give unsolicited advice to public companies than building. Ask the interns at EY and McKinsey.

Being Apple is just a structural disadvantage. Everyone knows that open claw is not secure, and it’s not like I blame the solo developer. He is just trying to get a new tool to market. But imagine that this got deployed by Apple and now all of your friends, parents and grandparents have it and implicitly trust it because Apple released it. Having it occasionally drain some bank accounts isn’t going to cut it.

This is not to say Apple isn’t behind. But OpenClaw is doing stuff that even the AI labs aren’t comfortable touching yet.

That's a really tough problem. I'm not even sure yet google can pull it off.

I'm no Apple fan, but they aren't in the business of foisting pleasantly packaged footguns on their customers.

Even with the most advanced LLMs and even sandboxing there is always the risk of prompt injections and data extraction.

Even if the AI can't directly upload data to the internet, or delete local data, there are always some ways to leak data. For example by crafting an email with the relevant text in white or invisible somewhere. The user clicks "ok send" from what they see, but still some data is leaked.

Apple intelligence is based on a local model on the device, which is much more susceptible for prompt injections.

This could have come in any form, a platform as the author points out for instance.

I have a couple of ideas, how about a permissions kit? Something where before or during you sign off on permissions. Or how about locked down execution sandboxes specifically for agentic loops? Also - why is there not yet (or ever?) a model trained on their development code/forums/manuals/data?

Before OpenClaw, I could see the writing on the wall. The ai ecosystem is not congruent to Apple's walled garden. In many ways because they have turned their backs on those 'misfits' their early ad-copy praised.

This 'misfit' mentality is what I like so much about the OpenClaw community. It was visible from it's very beginning with the devil-may-care disregard for privacy and security.

If they optimize their entire hardware line (iPhone, Watch, Mac Mini, Macbook) AI enhanced with local/remote LLM model, they will win big. Imagine someone running a business can manage their entire business with iPhone/Mac/iCloud without buying any other saas services (inventory, payments, customer service).

Steve Jobs

The bottleneck for emails and my calendar is not the speed at which I can type/click some buttons, but rather figuring out what I want to write or clarifying priorities when managing my calendar.

It’s a 1987 ad like video showing a professor interacting with what looks like the Dynabook as an essentially AI personal assistant. Apple had this vision a long time ago. I guess they just lost the path somewhere along the way.

Author spoke of compounding moats, yet Apple’s market share, highly performant custom silicon, and capital reserves just flew over his head. HN can have better articles to discuss AI with than this myopic hot take.

Especially in the “AI game”. Just yesterday Xcode got fuller agent support for coding way later than most IDEs.

I’d expect some sort of Shortcuts integration in the near future. There’s already Apple Foundation Models available to some extent with Shortcuts. I’m pretty sure they’ll improve it and use shortcuts for agentic workflows.

Having said all that, Maybe it’s my age. I think currently things are over-hyped

- Language models running in huge centers are still not sustainable. So even if you pay a few cents, it’s still running over capital fumes.

- it’s still a mixed bag. I guess it might be useful in terms of profession because like managing people to produce the desired result, you need skills to properly get desired results from AI. In that sense, fully automated agent filing my tax still feels concerning to me if later I won’t have coverage if something was off.

- on-device, this is where Apple shines hardware wise and I personally find it as more intriguing.

> They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid it.

I sincerely doubt that. If Apple charged $500 for a feature it would have to be completely bulletproof. Every little failure and bad output would be harshly criticized against the $500 price tag. Apple's high prices are already a point of criticism, so adding $500 would be highly debated everywhere.

I used to think this was because they didn’t take AI seriously but my assumption now is that Apple is concerned about security over everything else.

My bet is that Google gets to an actually useful AI assistant before Apple because we know they see it as their chance to pull ahead of Apple in the consumer market, they have the models to do it, and they aren’t overly concerned about user privacy or security.

If Peter Steinberger is able to generate even a 100M this year from Clawdbot what he has is a multi billion dollar business that would be life-changing even for a successful entrepreneur like him who is already a multi-millionaire. If it collapses from the security flaws, and other potential safety issues he loses nothing, starting from zero and going back to it. Peter Steinberger (and startups in general) have a lot to gain and very little or close to nothing to lose.

The iPhone generated 400B in revenue for Apple in 2025. Clawdbot even if it contributes 4B in revenue this very year would not move the needle much for Apple. On the contrary, if Apple rushes and botches releasing something like this they might just collapse this 400B/annum income stream. Apple and other large enterprises (and their execs) have a lot to lose and very little to gain from rushing into something like this.

This is because the simple reality of this new technology is that this is not the local maxima. Any supposed wall you attempt to put up will fail - real estate website closes its API? Fine, a CUA+VLM will make it trivial to navigate/extract/use. We will finally get back to the right solution of protocols over platforms, file over app, local over cloud or you know the way things were when tech was good.

P.S: You should immediately call BS when you see outrageous and patently untrue claims like "Mac minis are sold out all over.." - I checked my Best Buy in the heart of SF and they have stock. Or "that its all over Reddit, HN" - the only thing that is all over Reddit is unanimous derision towards OpenClaw and its security nightmares.

Utterly hate the old world mentality in this post. Looked up the author and ofcourse, he's from VC.

Straight up bullshit.

No sane person would let an AI agent file their taxes

What if you don't want to trust your computer with all your email and bank accounts? This is still not a mass market product.

The main problem I see here is that with restricted context AI is not able to do much. In order to see this kind of "magic" you have to give it all the access.

This is neither safe or acceptable for normie customers

You're right on the liability front - Apple still won because everyone bought their hardware and their margins are insanely good. It's not that they're sitting by waiting to become irrelevant, they're playing the long game as they always do.

and the very next line (because i want to emphasize it

> That trust—built over decades—was their moat.

This just ignores the history of os development at apple. The entire trajectory is moving towards permissions and sandboxing even if it annoys users to no end. To give access to an llm (any llm, not just a trusted one acc to author) the root access when its susceptible to hallucinations, jailbreak etc. goes against everything Apple has worked for.

And even then the reasoning is circular. "So you build all your trust, now go ahead and destroy it on this thing which works, feels good to me, but could occasionally fuck up in a massive way".

Not defending Apple, but this article is so far detached from reality that its hard to overstate.

So all the current users or OpenClaw are just beta-testers.

I guess now I’ll just use an AI agent to do the same thing instantly :(

However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs up their asses for all these years.

Welcome to the future I guess, everyone is a bot except you.

...and that writes blog posts for you. So tired of this voice.

Title is tech aspirational annd economic foolish: makes no sense whatsoever.

Who benefits from openclaw? Apple that’s who!

Who care that they “invented it” it free open software that drives hw sales.

We’re done here.

Nah if they are actually out of stock (I've only seen it out of stock at exceptional Microcenter prices; Apple is more than happy to sell you at full price) it is because there's a transition to M5 and they want to clear the old stock. OpenClaw is likely a very small portion of the actual Mac mini market, unless you are living in a very dense tech area like San Francisco.

One thing of note that people may forget is that the models were not that great just a year ago, so we need to give it time before counting chickens.

I don't pretend to know the future (nor do I believe anyone else who claims to be able to), but I think the opposite has a good chance of happening too, and hype would die down over "AI" and the bubble bursts, and the current overvaluation (imo at least. I still think it is useful as a tool, but overhyped by many who don't understand it.) will be corrected by the market; and people will look back and see it as the moment that Apple dodged a bullet. (Or more realistically, won't think about it at all).

I know you can't directly compare different situations, but I wonder if comparisons can be made with dot-com bubble. There was such hype some 20-30 years ago, with claims of just being a year or two away from, "being able to watch TV over the internet" or "do your shopping on the web" or "have real-time video calls online", which did eventually come true, but only much, much, later, after a crash from inflated expectations and a slower steady growth.*

* Not that I think some claims about "AI" will ever come true though, especially the more outlandish ones such as full-length movies made by a prompt of the same quality made by a Hollywood director.

I don't know what a potential "breaking point" would be for "AI". Perhaps a major security breach, even _worse_ prices for computer hardware than it is now, politics, a major international incident, environmental impact being made more apparent, companies starting to more aggressively monetize their "AI", consumers realising the limits of "AI", I have no idea. And perhaps I'm just wrong, and this is the age we live in now for the foreseeable future. After all, more than one of the things I have listed have already happened, and nothing happened.

So yeah, the market isn’t really signaling companies to make nice things.

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity." Terry A. Davis

Personal opinion.

I’m sure apple et al will eventually have stuff like OpenClaw but expecting a major company to put something so unpolished, and with such major unknowns, out is just asinine.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/HN0aaOLBzT

I do not like reading things like this. It makes me feel very disconnected from the AI community. I defensively do not believe there exist people who would let AI do their taxes.

Saved you a click. This is the premise of the article.

Let OpenClaw experiment and beta test with the hackers who won't mind if things go sideways (risk of creating Skynet aside), and once we've collectively figured out how to create such a system that can act powerfully on behalf of its users but with solid guardrails, then Apple can implement it.

Why are people needing the Mac Minis? Isn’t OpenClaw supposed to run locally in your laptop?

And if it actually should run as a service, why a MacMini and not some docker on the local NAS for instance?

OpenClaw is a symbol of everything that's wrong with AI, the same way that shitty memecoins with teams that rugpull you, or blockchain-adjacent centralized "give us your money and we pinky swear we are responsible" are a symbol of everything wrong with Web3.

Giving everyone GPU compute power and open source models to use it is like giving everyone their own Wuhan Gain of Function Lab and hoping it'll be fine. Um, the probability of NO ONE developing bad things with AI goes to 0 as more people have it. Here's the problem: with distributed unstoppable compute, even ONE virus or bacterium escaping will be bad (as we've seen with the coronavirus for instance, smallpox or the black plague, etc.) And here we're talking about far more active and adaptable swarms of viruses that coordinate and can wreak havoc at unlimited scale.

As long as countries operate on the principle of competition instead of cooperation, we will race towards disaster. The horse will have left the barn very shortly, as open source models running on dark compute will begin to power swarms of bots to be unstoppable advanced persistent threats (as I've been warning for years).

Gain-of-function research on viruses is the closest thing I can think of that's as reckless. And at least there, the labs were super isolated and locked down. This is like giving everyone their own lab to make designer viruses, and hoping that we'll have thousands of vaccines out in time to prevent a worldwide catastrophe from thousands of global persistent viruses. We're simply headed towards a nearly 100% likely disaster if we don't stop this.

If I had my way, AI would only run in locked-down environments and we'd just use inert artifacts it produces. This is good enough for just about all the innovations we need, including for medical breakthroughs and much more. We know where the compute is. We can see it from space. Lawmakers still have a brief window to keep it that way before the genie cannot be put back into the bottle.

A decade ago, I really thought AI would be responsible developed like this: https://nautil.us/the-last-invention-of-man-236814/ I still remember the quaint time when OpenAI and other companies promised they'd vet models really strongly before releasing them or letting them use the internet. That was... 2 years ago. It was considered an existential risk. No one is talking about that now. MCP just recently was the new hotness.

I wasn't going to get too involved with building AI platforms but I'm diving in and a month from now I will release an alternative to OpenClaw that actually shows the way how things are supposed to go. It involves completely locked-down environments, with reproducible TEE bases and hashes of all models, and even deterministic AI so we can prove to each other the provenance of each output all the way down to the history of the prompts and input images. I've already filed two provisional patents on both of these and I'm going to implement it myself (not an NPE). But even if it does everything as well as OpenClaw and even better and 100% safely, some people will still want to run local models on general purpose computing environments. The only way to contain the runaway explosion now is to come together the same way countries have come together to ban chemical weapons, CFCs (in the Montreal protocol), let the hole in the ozone layer heal, etc. It is still possible...

This is how I feel:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DIUCiGOTZ8J/

PS: Historically, for the last 15 years, I've been a huge proponent of open source and an opponent of patents. When it comes to existential threats of proliferation, though, I am willing to make an exception on both.