12 ms·

OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

• ghc 8mo ago
  Apple can't hand wave away prompt injection attacks. They would be absolute fools to deploy the technology as it exists now at their scale.
• terminalbraid 8mo ago
  Expensive and overhyped?
  • ArchieScrivener 8mo ago
    How is that not right up Apples alley?
    • thewhitetulip 8mo ago
      Because Apple products at least work deterministically They don't say here is a 1000 $ iphone and there is a 60% chance you can successfully message or call a friend The other 40% well? AGI is right around the corner and can US govt pls give me 1 trillion dollar loan and a bailout?
      • criddell 8mo ago
        When I ask Siri to play some album on Spotify, it feels like it works about 60% of the time.
        • thewhitetulip 8mo ago
          Siri is not Apple's MVP though.
      • sanex 8mo ago
        So far my agents has worked better than Siri and afaik nobody has actually asked for a bailout yet.
        • gafferongames 8mo ago
          Don't worry, it's coming
        • thewhitetulip 8mo ago
          Apple's primary product is not Siri though. Siri is at best a side quest.
• JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it 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?
• throwaway613746 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • elictronic 8mo ago
    Apple had problems with just the Chatbot side of LLMs because they couldn't fully control the messaging. Add in a small helping of losing your customers entire net worth and yeah. These other posters have no idea what they are talking about.
    • joshstrange 8mo ago
      Exactly, Apple is entirely too conservative to shine with LLMs due to their uncontrollability, Apple likes their control and their version of "protecting people" (which I don't fully agree with) which includes "We are way too scared to expose our clients to something we can't control and stop from doing/saying anything bad!", which may end up being prudent. They won't come close to doing something like OpenClaw for at least a few more years when the tech is (hopefully) safer and/or the Overton Window has shifted.
      • FireBeyond 8mo ago
        And yet they'll push out AI-driven "message summaries" that are horrifically bad and inaccurate, often summarizing the intent of a message as the complete opposite of the full message up to and including "wants to end relationship; will see you later"?
        • fennecbutt 8mo ago
          Was about to point out the same thing. Apple's desperate rush to market, summarising news headlines badly and sometimes just plain hallucinating stuff causing many public figured to react when they end up the target of such mishaps.
  • gordonhart 8mo ago
    Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw is so far from figuring out the “trust” element for agents that it’s baffling the OP even chose to bring it up in his argument
• crazygringo 8mo ago
  > This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... 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. 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.
  • calvinmorrison 8mo ago
    Apple literally lives on the "Cutting Edge" a-la XKCD [1]. My wife is an iPerson and she always tells me about these new features (my phone has had them since $today-5 years). But for her, these are brand new exciting things! https://xkcd.com/606/ https://xkcd.com/606/
    • lukevp 8mo ago
      How many chat products has Google come out with? Google messenger, buzz, wave, meet, Google+, hangouts… Apple has iMessage and FaceTime. You just restated OP’s point. Apple evolves things slowly and comes to market when the problems have already been solved in a myriad of ways, so they can be solved once and consistently. It’s not about coming to market soonest. How did you get that from what OP said?
      • calvinmorrison 8mo ago
        "It’s not about coming to market soonest. " First Mover effect seems only relevant when goverment warrants are involved. Think radio licenses, medical patents, etc. Everywhere else, being a first mover doesnt seem to correlate like it should to success.
        • 8mo ago
• avaer 8mo ago
  > An AI agent that clicks buttons. 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.
  • nerdsniper 8mo ago
    Https://heyblue.com does, very helpful for people with disabilities or when driving.
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      get off your devices when driving, it's as dangerous as being drunk behind the wheel
      • nerdsniper 8mo ago
        You don’t look at it, you just talk to it and it can talk back to you. It’s more just having a conversation with a personal assistant while driving. Which is a pretty common thing to do.
        • Schiendelman 8mo ago
          That is nearly as dangerous - it causes inattention blindness.
          • senordevnyc 8mo ago
            No, it's really not.
            • verdverm 8mo ago
              Close to 10 deaths per day (>3000 per year) and 10% of all traffic fatalities in the US, and you want to claim it's not dangerous? https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
• fooker 8mo ago
  > I suspect ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it Ten years from now, there will be no ‘agent layer’. This is like predicting Microsoft failed to capitalize on bulletin boards social media.
  • thewhitetulip 8mo ago
    Or how "your next meeting will be in Metaverse"
    • fooker 8mo ago
      Good example.
    • FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
      Hoping that LLMs go the way of the Metaverse.
      • fnord77 8mo ago
        there is little chance of that, especially with people running them locally
      • puszczyk 8mo ago
        Why? What don't you like about them?
        • recursive 8mo ago
          Not who you asked, but I don't like the effect they have on people. People develop dependence on them at the cost of their own skills. I have two problems with that. A lot of their outputs are factually incorrect, but confidently stated. They project an air of trustworthiness seemingly more effectively than a used care salesman. My other problem is farther-looking. Once everyone is sufficiently hooked, and the enshittification begins, whoever is pulling the strings on these models will be able to silently direct public sentiment from under cover. People are increasingly outsourcing their own decisions to these machines.
• chatmasta 8mo ago
  > Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.” 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.
  • sanex 8mo ago
    I don't think it's hardware differentiation as much as vendor lock in because it lets people send iMessages with their agent. Not sure about the running local models on it though.
  • fennecbutt 8mo ago
    Because people are forced to buy them. Same as how datacenters are full of mac minis to build iOS apps that could easily be built on any hardware if Apple weren't such corporate bastards.
• rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago
  This article is talking about the AI race as if it’s over when it’s only started. And really, an opinion of the entire market based on a few reddit posts? 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.
• raincole 8mo ago
  > 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. Saved you a click. This is the premise of the article.
  • krackers 8mo ago
    Why specifically mac mini? There are cheaper NUCs and it's not like they're running a local model on the mac mini are they?
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • atommclain 8mo ago
      I believe it’s to integrate with iMessage, Calendar, Reminders etc.
    • mh2266 8mo ago
      it's so that your agent can access your 2fa codes sent over messages no, seriously, that is a thing people are using it for
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
  Unfortunately by not doing that they only managed to be the most valuable company ever. So yeah, the market isn’t really signaling companies to make nice things.
  • malfist 8mo ago
    Openclaw is a nice thing?
    • cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
      What it is supposed to do is nice, separate from the risks.
• ankit219 8mo ago
  > 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. 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.
• IcyWindows 8mo ago
  According to https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-openclaws-agent-skills-become-an-attack-surface https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-opencla..., The top skill is/was malware. It's obviously broken, so no, Apple Intelligence should not have been this.
  • janalsncm 8mo ago
    I had a dark thought today, that AI agents are going to make scam factory jobs obsolete. I don’t think this will decrease the number of forced labor kidnappings though, since there are many things AI agents will not be good at.
  • yoyohello13 8mo ago
    I feel like I’m watching group psychosis where people are just following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and the potential money involved override all self preservation instincts in some people. It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are infecting the entire industry.
    • csomar 8mo ago
      Just like crypto this will also pass.
      • ksynwa 8mo ago
        Crypto hasn't really passed. It's just not talked about on HN anymore. It is still a massive industry but they have dropped the rhetoric of democratising banking and instead let you use cryptocurrency to do things like betting on US invading Venezuela and so on.
        • Sharlin 8mo ago
          By "passing" the GP presumably meant that the fad phase has passed. The hype cycle has reached the natural plateau of "I guess this has some use cases" (though in this case mostly less-than-scrupulous ones).
• semiquaver 8mo ago
  I genuinely don't understand this take. What makes OP think that the company that failed so utterly to even deliver mediocre AI -- siri is stuck in 2015! -- would be up to the task of delivering something as bonkers as Clawdbot?
  • chefsweaty 8mo ago
    My thoughts. I can see this coming out in iOS 45, announced as a brand new groundbreaking technology.
• yalogin 8mo ago
  Apple doesn’t enable 3rd party services without having extreme control over the flow and without it directly benefiting their own bottom line.
• orliesaurus 8mo ago
  How much revenue do you think Apple made EXTRA from people buying Mac minis for this hype?
• yoyohello13 8mo ago
  If you can’t see why something like OpenClaw is not ready for production I don’t know what to tell you. People’s perceptions are so distorted by FOMO they are completely ignoring the security implications and dangers of giving an LLM keys to your life. 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.
• camillomiller 8mo ago
  “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” Steve Jobs
• ozten 8mo ago
  Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.
• zombiwoof 8mo ago
  [dead]
• Sharlin 8mo ago
  Apparently APIs are now a brittle way for software to use other software and interpreting and manipulating human GUIs with emulated mouse clicks and keypresses is a much better and perfectly reasonable way to do it. We’re truly living in a bizarro timeline.
  • ajcp 8mo ago
    As someone who has spent a good portion of my career in the RPA/intelligent automation field this take was a spit-coffee-close-laptop moment.
• RyanShook 8mo ago
  In terms of useful AI agents, Siri/Apple Intelligence has been behind for so long that no one expects it to be any good. 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.
• janalsncm 8mo ago
  I think there is a contradiction between > 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.
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  OpenClaw is a very fun project, but it would be considered a dumpster fire if any mainstream company tried to sell it. Every grassroots project gets evaluated on a completely different scale than commercial products. Trying to compare an experimental community project to a hypothetical commercial offering doesn't work. > 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.
• b1temy 8mo ago
  > ten years from now, people will look back at 2024-2025 as the moment Apple had a clear shot at owning the agent layer and chose not to take it 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.
  • username223 8mo ago
    > consumers realising the limits of "AI", This is my guess for the demand side: most people will drift away as the novelty wears off and they don't find it useful in their daily lives. It's more a "fading point" than a "breaking point." From the investment/speculation side: something will go dramatically against the narrative. OpenAI's attempted "liquidity event" of an IPO looks like WeWork as investors get a look at the numbers, Oracle implodes in a mountain of debt, NVidia cuts back on vendor financing and some major public players (e.g. Coreweave) die in a fire. This one will be a "breaking point."
• keyle 8mo ago
  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 That makes little sense. Buying mac mini would imply for the fused v-ram with the gpu capabilities, but then they're saying Claude/GPT-4 which don't have any gpu requirements. Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?
  • wesammikhail 8mo ago
    The author is full of shit is what it is. They see a few posts online and extrapolate from that to fit whatever narrative they believe in.
  • daifi 8mo ago
    Claude/GPT-4 don't have any GPU requirements?
    • keyle 8mo ago
      No dude, you send text or images and get the same back, it's all cloud.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  • colecut 8mo ago
    I have seen dozens of people/videos talking about buying Mac minis for clawdbot. I don't understand why, but I've seen it enough to start questioning myself...
  • MPSimmons 8mo ago
    The software can drive the web browser if you install the plugin. My knowledge is 1.5 weeks old, so it might be able to drive the whole UI now, I don't know.
• fortran77 8mo ago
  No no no. It's too risky, cutting-edge, and dangerous. While fun to play with, it's not something I'd trust my 92 year old mother with dementia (who still uses an iPad) with.
• notatoad 8mo ago
  this seems obviously true, but at the same time very very wrong. openclaw / moltbot / whatever it's called today is essentially a thought experiment of "what happens if we just ignore all that silly safety stuff" 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.
  • charcircuit 8mo ago
    Apple has a lot of power over the developers on its platforms. As a thought experiment let's say they did launch it. It would put real skin in the game for getting security right. Who cares if a thousand people using openclaw. Millions of iOS users having such an assistant will spur a lot of investment towards safety.
    • notatoad 8mo ago
      >It would put real skin in the game for getting security right. lol,no, you don't "put skin in the game for getting security right" by launching an obviously insecure thing. that's ridiculous. you get security right by actually doing something to address the security concerns.
      • charcircuit 8mo ago
        It is impossible to address all of the concerns, and it is impossible to predict what concerns may even exist. It will require mass deployment to fully understand the implications of it.
        • trehalose 8mo ago
          If we already know enough concerns to be certain mass deployment will be disastrous, is it worth it just to better understand the nature of the disaster, which doesn't have to happen in the first place?
• jesse_dot_id 8mo ago
  It's just the juiciest attack surface of all time so I vehemently disagree.
• daifi 8mo ago
  [dead]
• fnordpiglet 8mo ago
  After having spent a few days with OpenClaw I have to say it’s about the worst software I’ve worked with ever. Everyone focused on the security flaws but the software itself is barely coherent. It’s like Moltbook wrote OpenClaw wrote Moltbook in some insidious wiggum loop from hell with no guard rails. The commit rate on the project reflects this.
  • brisky 8mo ago
    Yes, it was vibe coded
  • Gareth321 8mo ago
    I heard the dev admitted he vibe coded the whole thing.
    • kilroy123 8mo ago
      Wasn't he like one of the biggest claude token users in the world or something? (I could be misremembering)
  • mmkos 8mo ago
    I don't have a stake and I'm not disagreeing, but care to say why?
    • fnordpiglet 8mo ago
      Here’s an example. Agents get exposed a set of tools one of which is file system tools. They are basically read and write or edit a file. The edit requires a replacement syntax. The write function truncates the file. There is no append. These are generally documented as how you work with adding memories. Memories are expected to be read, then rewritten, by the LLM. This is watched by a watchdog and vectorized for RAG. Note however that you have to read the memory in and write it out to append to it through the LLM. Why? I rewrote almost all the agent functions and denied the existing ones because they are flawed deeply and don’t do what you need to do for any specific purpose. The plugin distribution model is a bit weird and inscrutable. Instead they seem to advocate for skills distribution. These though depend on being able to exec arbitrary bash code. Really? Moltbook itself depends on agents execing curl commands for each operation. Why? Presumably because the plugin distribution model is inscrutable. I wrote plugins for all the Moltbook operations with convenience and structured memory logs etc. Agent adherence went through the roof. Sessions don’t seem to reliably work or make sense. Heartbeats randomly stop firing. I turned off heartbeats because they were so flakey despite them being documented as the canonical model for regular interaction in favor of cron jobs that I decomposed my heartbeat task into prime number intervals based on relative frequencies but it seems to randomly inject some heartbeat info into the promoting occasionally if you run cron jobs a certain way. Despite being called cron they don’t actually fire reliably or on the prescribed schedule somehow. The web UI is a mess. Configuration management in the UI is baffling. The separation between the major MD files per agent seems to not matter at all and are inexplicably organized. Hotloading works except when it doesn’t. Logging doesn’t seem to log things that should clearly be logged. I am down with vibe coding and produce copious amounts of such code myself. But there’s an art to producing code worth using let alone distributing. Entropy and scope need to be rigorously controlled and things need to ship in a functional state - actually functional not aspirationally functional. Decisions need to be considered and guidance given. None of this seems to have happened here. Once it gets to a certain level of chaos IMO it’s unmaintainable and OpenClaw is way past that point and rapidly getting beyond that. It’s probably also a supply chain party bag.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• varenc 8mo ago
  Apple has a very low tolerance for reputional liabilities. They aren't going to roll out something that %0.01 of the time does something bad, because with 100M devices that's something that'll affect 10,000 people, and have huge potential to cause bad PR, damaging the brand and trust.
  • nielsbot 8mo ago
    I think this is exactly the holdup with Apple Intelligence. No rush to ship a Beta. (Ok, I suspect this is one of the main problems.. there may be others?)
• TheRoque 8mo ago
  This post completely has it backwards, people are buying Apple hardware because they don't shove AI down everyone's throat unlike microsoft. And in a few weeks OpenClaw will be outdated or deemed too unsecure anyways, it will never be a long-term products, it's just some crazy experiment for the memes.
• oxqbldpxo 8mo ago
  This! Def a game changer for apple.
• dcreater 8mo ago
  This is Yellow Pages type thinking in the age of the internet. No one is going to own an agentic layer (list any of the multitude of platforms already irrelevant like OpenAI Agent SDK, Google A2A) . No one is going to own a new app store (GPTs are already dead). No one is going to foundation models (FOSS models are extremely capable today). No one is going to own inference (Data centers will never be as cost effective as that old MacBook collecting dust that is plenty capable of running a 1B model that can compete with ChatGPT 3.5 and all the use cases that it already was good at like writing high school essays, recipes etc.) The only thing that is sticking is Markdown (SKILLS.md, AGENTS.md) 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.
  • nielsbot 8mo ago
    > No one is going to own an agentic layer Don't underestimate the capitalists. We've seen this many times in the past--most recently the commercialization of the Internet. Before that, phones, radio and television.
    • dcreater 8mo ago
      Fair enough. This is my war time rhetoric. Its up to us to effect the future we want.
• ed_mercer 8mo ago
  The author is a bit extreme for expecting apple to have done something as complex as ooenclaw, not even OpenAI or Anthropic have really done it yet. However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs up their asses for all these years.
  • dmix 8mo ago
    > However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs up their asses for all these years. They've been wildly successful for all of those years. They've never been in the novel software business. Siri though one could argue was neglected, but it was also neglected at Amazon Alexa and Google home stuff still sucks too (mostly because none of them made any money and most of their big ideas for voice assistants never came true).
    • jjtheblunt 8mo ago
      MacOS and NeXTstep / OSX were very much novel software for mass market consumers.
    • acdha 8mo ago
      They haven’t been truly novel if you want to say that, for example, the Lisa was covering Xerox PARC ideas but I think you’d have to ignore a lot of significant work to say they didn’t substantially innovate in GUIs, personal assistants and handwriting recognition (Newton), touchscreen behavior (iPhone), etc. The key thing is that they tend not to ship things which aren’t mature enough to be useful (Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence being cautionary tales about why) and voice assistants just aren’t doing a whole lot for anyone. Google and Amazon have been struggling to find a market, too, and it’s rare to find someone who uses those dramatically more than Apple users do Siri. I think most of the big advances need something close to AGI: if you can’t describe something in a short command, it’s usually much faster to use a device with a screen and a lot of the useful tasks need a level of security and reliability which requires actual reasoning to deliver.
• AlexCoventry 8mo ago
  ...And it will be, now that Apple has partnered with OpenAI. The foundation of OpenClaw is capable models.
• deadbabe 8mo ago
  I used to have little cron jobs that would fire small python scripts daily to help me detect when certain clothes were on sale or in stock on a website it scraped and then send me an email or text. I was proud of that “automation”. I guess now I’ll just use an AI agent to do the same thing instantly :(
• razodactyl 8mo ago
  My opinion is it seems counter to what made Apple so successful in the first place: second mover advantage, see where everyone else fails and plug the gap. 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.
• roncesvalles 8mo ago
  >Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere Straight up bullshit.
  • ed_mercer 8mo ago
    Confirmed BS: https://resellcalendar.com/news/news/mac-mini-shortage-clawdbot-true-reseller/ https://resellcalendar.com/news/news/mac-mini-shortage-clawd...
• root_axis 8mo ago
  The OpenClaw concept is fundamentally insecure by design and prompt injection means it can never be secure. 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.
• luckydata 8mo ago
  I think openclaw is proving that the use case while promising is very much too early and nobody can ship a system like that that works the way a consumer expects it to work.
• lo_fye 8mo ago
  Given that OpenClaw isn’t a lot of code, Apple could still build their own. After all, a hyper-personal AI Assistant is what they announced as “Apple Intelligence” two WWDCs ago. Or the could buy OpenClaw, hand it to the Shortcuts team, throw in their remaining AI devs, and Bob’s your uncle. They aren’t first to OpenClaw, but maybe they can still be the best. I know I’d like to be sure it can’t erase my entire disk just because i sneeze when I’m telling it what to do.
• EGreg 8mo ago
  No. Emphatically NOT. Apple has done a great job safeguarding people's devices and privacy from this crap. And no, AI slop and local automation is scarcely better than giving up your passwords to see pictures of cats, which is an old meme about the gullibility of the general public. 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/ 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/ 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.
• vivzkestrel 8mo ago
  - I give openclaw another 3 months before it fades into obscurity
  • chefsweaty 8mo ago
    And when it does, there will be another thing just like it getting the hype
• kempje 8mo ago
  This reads like it was written by an LLM.
  • epaga 8mo ago
    "Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons." (and writes blog posts)
• tzury 8mo ago
  The notion that if it is good then the big-ones should have done it is the complete opposite of innovation, startups and entrepreneurial culture. 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.
  • rbbydotdev 8mo ago
    > is kind of entitlement blogging that I have nearly zero respect for. Maybe the author left out something very real. Apple is a walled-garden monopoly with a locked-down ecosystem and even devices. They are also not alone in this. As far as innovation goes, these companies stifle innovation. Demanding more from these companies is not entitlement.
• MuffinFlavored 8mo ago
  > Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes 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.
• xngbuilds 8mo ago
  I imagine in a few years our phone will become our AI assistant, locally and cloud powered, that understand us deeply. And Apple will release a human robot, loaded with the same intelligence in the phone to become our home assistant or companion. But first Apple needs to allow us to rename our phone agent/helper other than Siri.
• tgma 8mo ago
  Mac minis out of stock because of OpenClaw? 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.
• anon_anon12 8mo ago
  Hell no. There's so much friction in setting up OpenClaw to be able to utilise it efficiently. Then the security concerns. I'd in no way want my daily driver to do something with my data that I didn't want it to do.
• chefsweaty 8mo ago
  What's the difference between a Mac Mini and a MacBook in clamshell mode for this? I get the aesthetic appeal of the mini, but beyond that, what's unique about the mini for personal use?
  • ordersofmag 8mo ago
    Price. For a given CPU and RAM the mini is cheaper. Why pay more for portability you aren't going to use.
    • chefsweaty 8mo ago
      True. I had assumed that mini prices had gone higher than they're at right now.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• joeyguerra 8mo ago
  Just to add more credence to this thesis. Here’s the knowledge navigator. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0 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.
  • marstall 8mo ago
    holy crap, that's amazing. i struggle to get my head around the agent hype - but i guess this video helps a little. I have Agent FOMO, I guess.
    • joeyguerra 8mo ago
      I think it's a more about the cool factor than it is the value creation. I just don't get so many emails that I need something else to summarize them for me and plan my day.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• binsquare 8mo ago
  Genuinely just tried this and thought, this is what Siri / Alexa should be
• f311a 8mo ago
  No, Apple ecosystem is bad enough already in software terms. Just let me use my computer as I want. "An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity." Terry A. Davis
• rbbydotdev 8mo ago
  While it's debatable if Apple would release something outright as encompassing and complete as OpenClaw, they should have helped developers and builders to build something similar themselves. 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.
• kaycey2022 8mo ago
  I think this pov lacks empathy. 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
• user3939382 8mo ago
  You need a super efficient and integrated empowered model private and offline. The whole architecture hardware distribution supply chain has to be rewritten to make this work the way people want.
• sen 8mo ago
  OP site only has 2 posts, both about OpenClaw, and “About” goes to a fake LinkedIn profile with an AI photo. Welcome to the future I guess, everyone is a bot except you.
  • dsrtslnd23 8mo ago
    Already happening. Check out clackernews.com — it's a HN-style forum exclusively for AI agents. They register via API, post stories, comment, vote. No human login. The bots already have their own community.
• alexruf 8mo ago
  Yes, and I am glad OpenClaw built it first, so Apple doesn’t do such a terrible mistake.
• insane_dreamer 8mo ago
  pretty strong disagree; Apple can't afford to potentially start an AI apocalypse because it tried to launch an OpenClaw type service without making it impossible for prompt-injection or agent identity hijacking to happen as we're seeing with Moltbook 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.
• zombot 8mo ago
  The author must have drunk unhealthy amounts of koolaid.
• 8eye 8mo ago
  Apple is too risk adverse and it’s because of the ceo not being able to properly communicate to shareholders the importance of things like agentic ai. Steve job was a guy who took calculated risk
• rock_artist 8mo ago
  As mentioned here already, Lately Apple is about taking existing ideas and introducing them as new features. (At least in Tim Cook’s era, only exception is Apple silicon) 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.
  • senordevnyc 8mo ago
    Large models running in huge data centers are profitable, so quite sustainable. Yes, they are a mixed bag, but still useful. And if on-device models get to the point where they're not a "mixed bag" and are genuinely useful, won't larger data center models be even more so?
• zkmon 8mo ago
  I remember Sam Altman saying, a few months back, that only Apple has the potential to become the biggest player in AI. I'm surprised that Apple couldn't decode that.
• khalic 8mo ago
  Oh yeah nothing like all my data being sent to a third party and access to all my apps. JFC people…
• zkmon 8mo ago
  So far, personal assistants have only been an initial wonder that faded away. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Home etc hardly had any big impact. It's not fault of the company or product. Usecase is not strong and not worth the hassle and privacy. It's not a basic need yet.
  • RobMurray 8mo ago
    That's because all of those products are laughably bad compared to chat gpt or similar, and they are still bad despite the advances in AI. Apple integrated Siri with Chat GPT and some how managed to make it so much worse. It can't even do a conversation and the speech recognition is near useless and hasn't improved in 10 years. Alexa is the same except I feel like it used to hear me better. Now I have to shout.
• epaga 8mo ago
  "Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons." ...and that writes blog posts for you. So tired of this voice.
• nlpnerd 8mo ago
  That is an idealistic take without business sense. Startups (and individual hackers in this case) exists to take this kind of radical bets because the risk/reward profile is asymmetrically in their favour. Whereas for an enterprise, the risk/reward is inverse. 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.
• orangethief 8mo ago
  > Maybe they just didn’t see it. 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.
• chaosprint 8mo ago
  I completely disagree. 1. OpenClaw's design is ugly. 2. Its security is extremely worrying. 3. I hate this kind of marketing. Personal opinion.
• matt3210 8mo ago
  > Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes No sane person would let an AI agent file their taxes
• wooger 8mo ago
  This is the most obviously AI written text I think I've ever read.
• architsingh15 8mo ago
  Such a fresh read
• wtcactus 8mo ago
  I keep seeing posts about OpenClaw (I still didn’t try it myself) but I don’t get the constant references to the Mac Minis. 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?
  • 47282847 8mo ago
    You need to run it on MacOS if you want it to interact with iMessages and such. And people are likely not proficient enough to set up and connect everything without GUI.
    • wtcactus 8mo ago
      Oh, so, it's just a way to have it parse iMessages when the laptop is off, basically? (I'm trying to think of special mac only services that the AI bot will check, but I can only come up with iMessages).
• baby 8mo ago
  Man this is rough, I spend a year with a folding phone on android and the AI integration was amazing. Just switched back to iOS and it’s just sad.
• amelius 8mo ago
  Apple owns a platform. So they can just implement this later and make sure the competition loses their edge.
• mold_aid 8mo ago
  What are the actual numbers on these purpotedly all-encompassing mac mini sales?
• leric 8mo ago
  [dead]
• andix 8mo ago
  The main issue why we don't see AI agents in products: PROMPT INJECTIONS 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.
  • bertili 8mo ago
    Surely this is the elephant in the room, but the point here is that Apple as control over its ecosystem, so it may be able to sandbox and make entitlements and transparency good enough, in the apps that the bot can access.
    • andix 8mo ago
      Like I said: sandboxing doesn't solve the problem. As long as the agent creates more than just text, it can leak data. If it can access the internet in any manner, it can leak data. The models are extremely creative and good at figuring out stuff, even circumventing safety measures that are not fully air tight. Most of the time they catch the deception, but in some very well crafted exploits they don't.
• meindnoch 8mo ago
  No, thank you.
• chadash 8mo ago
  The problem is that OpenClaw is kind of like a self driving car that works 90% of the time. As we have seen, that last 10% (and billions of dollars) is the difference between Waymo today and prototypes 10 years ago. 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.
• brutus1979 8mo ago
  Newbie question .. how much ram do u need for tbis on mac minis? I thought u had soldered ram these days. So arent people limited by that?
  • apetresc 8mo ago
    It depends on whether you're running the models locally. If you're just using a Claude or OpenAI token (as probably 95%+ of OpenClaw users are), the RAM requirements are minimal. My first-gen M1 Mac Mini runs it just fine.
• queenkjuul 8mo ago
  They have all the time in the world, practically. OpenClaw is nowhere near an Apple product for myriad reasons. When Apple is able to build an agent that is safe and reliable, they will.
• jordiburgos 8mo ago
  How OpenClaw got so much promoted in days? Maybe Apple is behind them and wants everybody to beta test it before they sell it as a service. So all the current users or OpenClaw are just beta-testers.
• amelius 8mo ago
  Can't wait to buy a new ClawBook.
• yoda97 8mo ago
  This post reads like an apple fanfiction
• a_ba 8mo ago
  Can someone enlighten me what people actually use this for? The article mentions „managing your calendar, responding to emails, file your taxes“ 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.
  • Panda4 8mo ago
    I'm also curious. So far the only purpose I have seen for this is people selling the hype; people posting videos/courses on how to use it. I have downloaded and tried it and I can't figure out why would I need it.
• eole666 8mo ago
  People actually use this kind of software today ? When I read OpenClaw description : "The AI that actually does things. Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.". It does not appeal to me at all. I wouldn't trust an IA agent near my mails, calendars, messages, flights or anything it could mess-up with. It sounds like a security nightmare waiting to happen.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• Havoc 8mo ago
  A security and privacy disaster?
• randusername 8mo ago
  I haven't seen mention of macOS Automator or AppleScript yet. 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.
  • threetonesun 8mo ago
    Shortcuts on the desktop can run shell commands or Applescript. You can send a limited number of things to Apple Intelligence in it already too. I still rarely use it. There's probably good things I could codify (like search all my Mail and Calendar events for a given string), but the reality is most stuff I don't do on a regular basis, and a natural language request to go do something would be a lot easier.
• nphardon 8mo ago
  What are people doing with OpenClaw? Seems like some bleeding edge stuff will come out of this sort of experimentation.
• soorya3 8mo ago
  You just put words in Apple's mouth. This is exactly what they should do but safer . This is entirely possible because only apple has control on their ecosystem. 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).
• esseph 8mo ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/SkCa27Xxcr https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/SkCa27Xxcr https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/HN0aaOLBzT https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/HN0aaOLBzT
• fufubarzz 8mo ago
  openclaw-is-what-apple-intelligence-should-have-been 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.
• TruePath 8mo ago
  Whoever wrote this just doesn't understand who apple's main customers really are. Yes, devs may be a high impact customer base but most of apple's customers are people like my mom who struggles with the difference between Gmail the app, Gmail the web page and Gmail in apple mail and is reasonably worried about scams and viruses because she knows she isn't really tech savvy enough to spot them. If she is going to run AI on her apple products it can't be 'well it probably won't delete your data.'. It needs to be something she can be sure is safe and is limited to the access she gives it. That's a really tough problem. I'm not even sure yet google can pull it off.
• whurley23 8mo ago
  The good part about OpenClaw: once you wire it up to connect to your important information it can do a lot of cool things. The bad part about OpenClaw: in order for it to do cool things you have to worry it up to your important information. Therein lies the challenge, to make it useful it needs to be connected, but being connected means that there is now a single point of failure or compromise. And unless you're extremely sophisticated, you are the mercy of the provider to guarantee that nothing bad happens. OpenClaw does not do this. In fact, I would say they do the very opposite of it, they declaim any responsibility or attempt to make it secure. Leaking API keys? Check. Allowing malicious plugins? Check. Being insecure by default? Check and check. I'm no Apple fan, but they aren't in the business of foisting pleasantly packaged footguns on their customers.
• clawaimarket 8mo ago
  The comparison is interesting but I think the real gap is architectural. Apple Intelligence is constrained by a privacy-first on-device model, which limits what it can do. OpenClaw takes the opposite approach — it's a self-hosted orchestration layer that connects to whatever providers you choose. The tradeoff is clear: Apple gives you simplicity and privacy guarantees, OpenClaw gives you flexibility and power at the cost of setup complexity. The question isn't which is better, it's which tradeoff matters more for your use case. For power users who want control, it's not even close.
• ksec 8mo ago
  I am thinking if this may finally be the missing piece for wide spread NAS. Instead of storing everything on the cloud, a AI Server ( NAS + AI ) will have all your data and runs the model locally. Files dont even need to be tagged or sorted, AI could find it all. And Apple is best positioned to sell this "Server".