I remember 4 years ago I was able to setup MacOS in a virtual machine. Maybe you can setup an Intel copy of MacOS on a qemu/kvm virtual machine?

Ever considered second hand slightly older gens? Even M1 is still great for many use cases. E.g. often corps are selling them on Ebay, in pretty good condition.

If you send me an email I might have a machine or MacOS VM on that machine you can use.

Not sure what happened to you with macincloud, but I used scaleway hosted Mac mini M1 a couple years ago for a self hosted CI server, and it was working very nicely.

My understanding is that openclaw is only a factor, and a relatively minor one.

Most likely the limiting factor is the crunch that chip companies are going through.

An M4 mini is overkill just to run OpenClaw. I'm running it on a Pentium J5005 and it's running 20 other services in Docker. I think the main thing was many wanted it to be able to access iMessage. I think people dream of also using the mac to run the LLM but the 16gb ones don't have enough ram.

You can look up benchmarks. It's different depending on the model of Mac Mini and Model of LLM.

The take away is that some of the Apple hardware hits a sweet spot for performance and price which may change in the future but for now it's causing a lot of demand so people can run inference without GPUs.

Also Macs keep a lot of their resale value so you can use them for a while and then sell them for sometimes 80% of their original value.

Mac mini has first-class access to iCloud, photos, iMessage etc. So if you are deep in the Apple ecosystem you might prefer it for that reason. I have a windows gaming desktop that I could use as a server for openclaw/cowork but I realized I simply don’t trust that system enough to give it access to all the personal stuff I’m giving to the AI. I trust Anthropic and Apple. I don’t trust whatever junk is running on my gaming desktop.

If you want to run local models, another advantage is Apple’s unified memory architecture. The biggest Mac mini has 64gb ram and Mac Studio has up to 512gb. Compare this little box to what monster Nvidia gpu system you would have to buy to get the same memory there. That doesn’t account for the shortage of basic $600 Mac minis though.

Affordable ram!

I recently bought one for my k3s cluster, and it was the cheapest 16g ram I could get by a decent margin.

The Neo won't sell dozens of models they will take the low end laptop market by storm. I think your comment will age very poorly

> so bad indeed that they took a bet on the low price sector with the Neo and abandoned the powerhouses

The Neo isn't just a bet on low prices - it's a machine that convinces people they can get away with less RAM. In the middle of a pricing crunch, why wouldn't you ship an 8GB machine like the Neo?

Its a win-win, Apple gets to ship a brand new SKU in volume despite the RAM crunch, and they get to punch into a previously untouched market.

Rightly deserved

Historically whenever they’ve done lower price products - iPhone SE, the current E editions, etc - they’ve sold poorly, that’s what probably got them.

The thing is that the Neo is actually useful.