Do I Have To Buy a Mac Mini to Run OpenClaw?

Nope. But it’s fantastic hardware that’s ideally suited for Open Claw.

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

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 hardware. 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

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 available until April. The M4 Pro models aren’t until June. The Mac Studio M3 Ultra I have on order is backordered everywhere. Apple will be ramping up production no doubt.

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. Always-on, always-connected, always ready.

More on what it’s actually running — coming soon.