Do I Have To Buy a Mac Mini to Run Open Claw?

March 29, 2026 · 78704 · 2 min read

I’ve started plaing with Open Claw and having a ball. Actually inspired me to start blogging again after taking looooooooong break. For those unfamiliar it’s an open source personal always on agent that can live in the cloud….but it seems most of us are running on local computers. No more giving so much data to Open AI or Anthropic.

The Open Claw forks are exloding - most notable Nemo Claw by NVIDIA.

Open Claw runs great on a mac!

You can run OpenClaw on whatever computer you already have — an old laptop works fine. Lots of folks even using raspberry pis. With more horsepower come more options to run local LLMs. More on that later.

Why Mac Mini

Mac Mini in the Austin sun

I looked at small PCs for comparison — and it’s a mess. I genuinely didn’t know what the best equivalent would be. If I wanted to train a model, sure — I’d be looking at NVIDIA GPUs. But that’s not what this is. I wanted simple, fast, and easy. Mac Mini.

But any computer will work - mac, windows, linux.

It’s All About Memory

Apple Silicon’s unified memory means you don’t have to think about RAM, GPU, VRAM, whether your model fits in memory, or which configuration matters. On a Mac Mini there’s no separation. Memory management is nothing you need to think about.

The Hunt

Mac Mini M4 Pro order confirmation

I naively thought I could walk into an Apple Store and pick one up. That’s not a thing.

I ordered one in early March. Delivery kept slipping — March 13-20 became April 13-20. I started watching different configurations and one day a next-day shipping option appeared. I jumped on it.

What I’m running: M4 Pro, 12-core CPU, 24GB unified memory, 512GB SSD.

There’s a run on these right now. No Mac Mini configuration is currently available until April. The M4 Pro models aren’t until June. Apple seems so far behind on AI - Siri is a joke now. But maybe apple will sell a ton of these. I bet they were confused at first on why so many were being sold.

Where It Lives

Right now it’s on a windowsill catching some Austin sun, running over wireless while I get things dialed in. Once it’s stable it goes onto wired ethernet, plugged into the router, and disappears. My own personal AI that’s just a text away.