OpenClaw is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been
Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere, and it’s not because people suddenly need more coffee table computers.
If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: 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-5, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware. Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons.
This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been.
Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.” They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.
They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid it. The margins would have been obscene. And they would have won the AI race not by building the best model, but by being the only company that could ship an AI you’d actually trust with root access to your computer. That trust—built over decades—was their moat.
So why didn’t they?
Maybe they just didn’t see it. That sounds mundane, but it’s probably the most common reason companies miss opportunities. When you’re Apple, you’re thinking about chip design, manufacturing scale, and retail strategy. An open-source project letting AI agents control computers might not ping your radar until it’s already happening.
Or maybe they saw it and decided the risk wasn’t worth it. If you’re Apple, you don’t want your AI agent automatically buying things, posting on social media, or making irreversible decisions. The liability exposure would be enormous. Better to ship something safe and limited than something powerful and unpredictable.
But there’s another dynamic at play. Look at who’s about to get angry about OpenClaw-style automation: LinkedIn, Facebook, anyone with a walled garden and a careful API strategy. These services depend on friction. They want you to use their app, see their ads, stay in their ecosystem. An AI that can automate away that friction is an existential threat.
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