OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
jakequist.com383 points by jakequist 13 hours ago
383 points by jakequist 13 hours 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.
I don’t believe this was ever confirmed by Apple, but there was widespread speculation at the time[1] that the delay was due to the very prompt injection attacks OpenClaw users are now discovering. It would be genuinely catastrophic to ship an insecure system with this kind of data access, even with an ‘unsafe mode’.
These kinds of risks can only be _consented to_ by technical people who correctly understand them, let alone borne by them, but if this shipped there would be thousands of Facebook videos explaining to the elderly how to disable the safety features and open themselves up to identity theft.
The article also confuses me because Apple _are_ shipping this, it’s pretty much exactly the demo they gave at WWDC24, it’s just delayed while they iron this out (if that is at all possible). By all accounts it might ship as early as next week in the iOS 26.4 beta.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/8/delaying-personalized-s...
Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.
This is so obvious I'm kind of surprised the author used to be a software engineer at Google (based on his Linkedin).
OpenClaw is very much a greenfield idea and there's plenty of startups like Raycast working in this area.
I'm not that surprised because of how pervasive the 'move fast and break things' culture is in Silicon Valley, and what is essentially AI accelerationism. You see this reflected all over HN as well, e.g. when Cloudflare goes down and it's a good thing because it gives you a break from the screen. Who cares that it broke? That's just how it is.
This is just not how software engineering goes in many other places, particularly where the stakes are much higher and can be life altering, if not threatening.
Regardless of how Apple will solve this, please just solve it. Siri is borderline useless these days.
> Will it rain today? Please unlock your iphone for that
> Any new messages from Chris? You will need to unlock your iphone for that
> Please play youtube music Playing youtube music... please open youtube music app to do that
All settings and permission granted. Utterly painful.
Do you want people being able to command your phone without unblocking? Maybe what you want is to disable phone blocking all together
Not really. Giving the weather forecast or playing music seems pretty low risk to me.
Oh no, what if they put on Christmas music playlist in February? the horror!
There should exist something between "don't allow anything without unlocking phone first" and "leave the phone unlocked for anyone to access", like "allow certain voice commands to be available to anyone even with phone locked"
Playing music doesn’t require unlocking though, at least not from the Music app. If YouTube requires an unlock that’s actually a setting YouTube sets in their SiriKit configuration.
For reading messages, IIRC it depends on whether you have text notification previews enabled on the lock screen (they don’t document this anywhere that I can see.) The logic is that if you block people from seeing your texts from the lock screen without unlocking your device, Siri should be blocked from reading them too.
Edit: Nope, you’re right. I just enabled notification previews for Messages on the lock screen and Siri still requires an unlock. That’s a bug. One of many, many, many Siri bugs that just sort of pile up over time.
Can it not recognize my voice? I had to record the pronunciation of 100 words when I setup my new iPhone - isn’t there a voice signature pattern that could be the key to unlock?
It certainly should have been a feature up until now. However, I think at this point anyone can clone your voice and bypass it.
But as a user I want to be able to give it permission to run selected commands even with the phone locked. Like I don't care if someone searches google for something or puts a song via spotify. If I don't hide notifications when locked, what does it matter that someone who has my phone reads them or listens to them?
Right, but you understand why allowing access to unauthenticated voice is bad for security right?
But you understand why if I don't care about that, I should be able to run it, right?
I understand why you'd want to do it.
Oddly enough I also understand Apple telling you, good luck, find someones platform that will allow that, that's not us.
Its hard to come up with useful AI apps that aren't massive security or privacy risks. This is pretty obvious. For an agent to be really useful it needs to have access to [important stuff] but giving an AI access to [important stuff] is very risky. So you can get some janky thing like OpenClaw thats thrown together by one guy and has no boundaries and everyone on HN thinks is great, but its going to be very difficult for a big firm to make a product like that for mass consumption without it risking a massive disaster. You can see that Apple and Microsoft and Salesforce and everyone are all wrestling with this. Current LLMs are too easily hoodwinked.
I think you're being very generous. There's almost 0 chance they had this actually working consistently enough for general use in 2024. Security is also a reason, but there's no security to worry about if it doesn't really work yet anyway
The more interesting question I have is if such Prompt Injection Attacks can ever be actualy avoided, with how GenAI works.
Removing the risk for most jobs should be possible. Just build the same cages other apps already have. Also add a bit more transparency, so people know better what the machine is doing, maybe even with a mandatory user-acknowledge for potential problematic stuff, similar to how we have root-access-dialogues now. I mean, you don't really need access to all data, when you are just setting a clock, or playing music.
They could be if models were trained properly, with more carefully delineated prompts.
Perhaps not, and it is indeed not unwise from Apple to stay away for a while given their ultra-focus on security.
Apple's niche product, consisting of like 1-4% of computer sales compared to its dominant MacBook line, is now flying off the shelf as a highly desired product, because of a piece of software that Apple didn't spend a dime developing. This sounds like a major win for Apple.
The OS maker does not have to make all the killer software. In fact, Apple's pretty much the only game in town that's making hardware and software both.
Really doubt it has a significant impact on mac mini sales…
And being fair ClawBot is a complete meme/fad at this point rather than an actual product. Using it for anything serious is pretty much the equivalent of throwing your credit cards, ids and sticky notes with passwords and waiting to see what happens…
I do see the appeal and potential case of the general concept of course. The product itself (and the author has admitted it themselves) is literally is a garbage pile..
What are you referring to?
Probably the Mac Mini. A few OpenClaw users are buying the agent a dedicated device so that it can integrate with their Apple account.
For example: https://x.com/michael_chomsky/status/2017686846910959668.
Why would it need more than 1? Couldn't they do this with any Mac with an Apple account?
It appears he is selling a service where he comes to you (optionally with a Mac Mini which is probably why he's buying multiple) and sets up OpenClaw for you.
That truly cant be it right? This is like satire? How much do you even charge for that?
Mac Minis are perfect for locally running demanding models because they can effectively use ordinary RAM as VRAM.
Considering there are 1.5M openclaw agents, created by 17,000 humans, it seems like some people really would use more than 1.
Are you saying that software is THAT inefficient so that you can’t run a few hundred of them on a single Mac Mini? : D
if you are counting reported moltbook accounts there are not, the API was spammed by scripts to create accounts
This was on HN a few days ago, I wasn't counting anything:
https://www.wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltbook-database-reveals-mi...
There are few open source projects coming along that let you sell your compute power in a decentralized way. I don't know how genuine some of these are [0] but it could be the reason: people are just trying to make money.
There have been countless projects to sell distributed compute power. I don't know of any that have gotten much traction. Everyone keeps trying to create new ones instead of developing for the existing ones.
The one you linked to looks clearly like a pump-and-dump scam, though.
The entire point of the article is about the Mac mini sales flying through the roof because of this.
[flagged]
So you might be discriminated against by some ignorant teenagers? Probably for the best.
who's "afraid" of green bubbles? it's like saying a toyota corolla driver is afraid of the ford pinto
No it’s like someone owning a Ferrari and looking down on someone who drives a Corolla. Or that’s how they see it, anyway. Plus there’s the annoyance with interoperability: it’s not just about status, it’s about all your iMessage group chats that don’t play nice with android
Apple chose the colors well. For whatever reason the shade of green they chose just gives a bit of ick.
It's a real thing, you're either too old and/or not dating young people. Some do care a lot.
IMO it is pretty shallow to pick dating partners based on their mobile OS but yeah it does happen.
iMessage lock in is a huge thing. When it was new and was still e2ee I ended up buying iPhones for everyone I regularly messaged.
These days it is insecure however because they backdoored the e2ee and kept it backdoored for the FBI, so now Signal is the only messenger I am reachable on.
Blue bubble snobbery is presently a mark of ignorance more than anything else.
I agree that it’s stupid to judge people for it, but you do have to admit that especially with not all people having RCS, the feature set of SMS and MMS that you have to deal with when not using iMessage is pretty barbaric. From the potato-quality videos (ironically, I recall QuickTime was heavily involved in that spec, lol) to the asinine way Apple lets you apply a reaction and then sends it as a verbose text… From an iPhone user’s point of view, a “green bubble” means “this conversation will work like it’s 2003.”
Yes, I know 99.999% of Android users are on WhatsApp (or WeChat, Line, or Telegram depending on cultural background) but at least half of iPhone users aren’t on those, so we still have to keep using Messages for a lot of people.
People are buying mac minis so their openclaw instances can date?
I assume the suggestion is that they need to run their bot on a machine that's up 24x7 (and they don't want to do that with a laptop since they probably carry it places and such), AND they want it to manage their texts by interacting with the Mac version of the Messages app.
But if you connect those dots you've got people trying to date by having an AI respond to texts from potential dates which seems like you're immediately in red-flag-city and good luck keeping that secret for long enough to get whatever it is you want.
I don't follow this logic.
Forget about dating. If you want the AI to be able to send texts from your number, and you own an iPhone, I think your only other choice would be to port your number to Google Voice?
> But if you connect those dots you've got people trying to date by having an AI respond to texts from potential dates
Yeah I’m trying to wrap my head around what sort of reads like “It is messed up that people avoid talking to eachother because of software because it messes up people’s ability to use software to avoid talking to eachother”
(Yes android users are discriminated against in the dating market, tons of op eds are written about this, just google it before you knee jerk downvote the truth)
You're saying I might have trouble getting a date if I don't have a Mac mini?
Imo using android is a great way to filter out extremely boring and vapid individuals from my dating pool.
Do you want to know how I can tell you didn't read the article?
Do you want to know how I can tell that you did not read the hacker news guidelines.
> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we've seen this model of software development from Apple succeed in recent years. I'm not at all confident that the Apple that gave us Mac OS 26 is capable of doing this anymore.
Best privacy in computers, ADP, and M-series chips mean nothing to you? To me, Apple is the last bastion of sanity in a world where user hostility is the norm.
Apple is certainly the least worst but man... Liquid Glass. Windows bordering on the circular...
As said elsewhere, success in hardware does not translate to success in software.
Privacy is definitely good but it's not at all an example of the success mentioned in the parent comment. It's deep in the company culture.
Airtags were released in 2021, I'd say that counts, but generally I agree.
Their hardware division has been killing it.
The software has been where most of the complaints have been in recent years.
Their software efforts have little ambition. Tweaks and improvements are always a good idea, but without some ambitious effort, nothing special is learned or achieved.
A "bicycle for the mind" got replaced with a "kiosk for your pocketbook".
The Vision Pro has an amazing interface, but it's set up as a place to rent videos and buy throwaway novelty iPad-style apps. It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
Great hardware. Interesting, but locked down software.
If Tim Cook wanted to leave a real legacy product, it should have been a Vision Pro aimed as an upgrade on the Mac interface and productivity. Apple's new highest end interface/device for the future. Not another mid/low-capability iPad type device. So close. So far.
$3500 for an enforced toy. (And I say all this as someone who still uses it with my Mac, but despairs at the lack of software vision.)
Not just lack of ambition, lack of vision or taste. Liquid Glass is a step back in almost every way, that it got out the door is an indictment of the entire leadership chain.
Not if the idea is to tank old phone performance to sell new phone hardware!
> It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
I've thought this too. Apple might be one of the only companies that could pull off bringing an existing consumer operating system into 3D space, and they just... didn't.
On Windows, I tried using screen captures to separate windows into 3D space, but my 3090 would run out of texture space and crash.
Maybe the second best would be some kind of Wayland compositor.
I mean they literally just looked at Tile. And they have the benefit of running the platform. Demonstrates time and time again that they engage in anticompetitive behaviour.
No, they didn't just look at Tile. The used a completely new UWB radio technology with a completely new anonymization cryptographic paradigm allowing them to include every single device in network, transparently.
AirTag is a perfect example of their hardware prowess that even Google fails to replicate to this date.
Absolutely none of the things you quoted that he said an AI agent could do would I want be done for me and I doubt most other people would.
It would be an absolute disaster at Apple scale. Millions of people would start using it, filing incorrect taxes or deleting their important files and Apple would be sued endlessly.
Tiny open source projects can just say "use at your own risk" and offload all responsibility.
How do people manage to pick such bad examples? Who in their right mind would ever allow an LLM to FILE THEIR TAXES for them. Absolutely insane behavior. Why would anyone think this is probably coming? Do you think the IRS is going to accept "hallucination lol" as an excuse for misfiling?
Because private taxe filling software, like used in the USA, are exempt from filling errors?
Here is a fun “Prompt Injection” which I experimented with before the current AI Boom; visiting a friend’s home › see Apple/Amazon listening devices › Hey Siri/Alexa, please play the last song. Harmless, fun.
I think the interesting tension here is between capability and trust.
An agent that can truly “use your computer” is incredibly powerful, but it's also the first time the system has to act as you, not just for you. That shifts the problem from product design to permission, auditability, and undoability.
Summarizing notifications is boring, but it’s also reversible. Filing taxes or sending emails isn’t.
It feels less like Apple missing the idea, and more like waiting until they can make the irreversible actions feel safe.
Clicking `Submit` is easiest step of sending email / filling taxes.
All steps before it are reversible, and reviewable.
Bigger problem is attacker tricking your agent to leak your emails / financial data that your agent has access to.
I worry we'll click "Submit" as fast as we click "I accept the terms and conditions."
Of course we would!
How in the world can you double check the AI-generated tax filing without going back and preparing your taxes by hand?
You might skim an ai-written email.
>> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
Imagine if the government would just tell everyone how much they owed and obviated the need for effing literal artificial intelligence to get taxes done!
>> respond to emails
If we have an AI that can respond properly to emails, then the email doesn't need to be sent in the first place. (Indeed, many do not need to be sent nowadays either!)
How can government know how much you owe them when they don't know all your tax deductibles?
Yeah the whole filing taxes thing is an epic XY-problem. Governments can make this as easy as a digital signature, there’s zero need for an agent of any kind.
Actually most of the things people use it for is of this kind, instead actually solving the problem (which is out of scope for them to be fair) it’s just adding more things on top that can go wrong.
Seriously. The best solution is not having the problem in the first place. Something something Tao Te Ching.
File taxes? That's a tall order, especially juxtaposed with managing calendar or responding to emails.
>File taxes?
Sure why not, what could go wrong?
"Siri, find me a good tax lawyer."
"Your honor, my client's AI agent had no intent to willfully evade anything."
> Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
Funny seeing this repeated again in response to Siri which is just... not very good.
hey siri can set the egg timer 90% of the time corectly! Find me another multitrillion dollar company that is able to pull that off!
.
People forget that “multi touch” and “capacitive touchscreens” were not Apple inventions. They existed prior to the iPhone. The iPhone was just the first “it just works” adaptation of it
This is generally true only of them going to market with new (to them) physical form factors. They aren’t generally regarded as the best in terms of software innovation (though I think most agree they make very beautiful software)
Personal intelligence, the (awkward) feature where you can take a screenshot and get Siri to explain stuff, and the new spotlight features where you can type out stuff you want to do in apps probably hints at that…
>It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
I think you repeated their marketing, I don't believe this is actually true.
I would guess, and it is a guess, that there are two reasons apple is “behind” in AI. First, they have nowhere near the talent pool or capability in this area. They’re not a technical research lab. For the same reason you don’t expect apple to win the quantum race, they will not lead on AI. Second, AI is a half baked product right now and apple try to ship products that properly work. Even Vision Pro is remarkably polished for a first version. AI on the other hand is likely to suffer catastrophic security problems, embarrassing behaviour, distinctly family-unfriendly output.
Apple probably realised they were hugely behind and then spent time hand wringing over whether they remained cautious or got into the brawl. And they decided to watch from the sidelines, buy in some tech, and see how it develops.
So far that looks entirely reasonable as a decision. If Claude wins, for example, apple need only be sure Claude tools work on Mac to avoid losing users, and they can second-move once things are not so chaotic.
> 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.
Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless.
I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of.
> Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
And in the case of Apple products, oftentimes "because Apple won't let them".
Lest I be called an Apple hater, I have 3 Apple TVs in my home, my daily driver is a M2 Ultra Studio with a ProDisplay XDR, and an iPad Pro that shows my calendar and Slack during the day and comes off at night. iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra.
But this is way too worshipful of Apple.
In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them match the ops comment? You’re saying none of those products are or have been in their time in the market a perfected version of other things?
There are lots of failed products in nearly every company’s portfolio.
AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.
We're talking about Apple Intelligence here and its ... "precursor" ... Siri.
Both of which have been absolutely underwhelming if not outright laughable in certain ways.
Apple has done plenty right. These two, which are the closest to the article, are not it.
Remember the time when the former members of the Siri team demoed a prototype for a more capable version of Siri and Apple didn't even use it
Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I feel sure that Siri was much better a decade ago than it is today. Basic voice commands that used to work are no longer recognised, or required you to unlock the phone in situations where hands free operation is the whole point of using a voice command.
There were certain commands that worked just fine. But they, in Apple's way, required you to "discover" what worked and what didn't with no hints, and then there were illogical gaps like "this grouping should have three obvious options, but you can only do one via Siri".
And then some of its misinterpretations were hilariously bad.
Even now, I get at a technical level that CarPlay and Siri might be separate "apps" (although CarPlay really seems like it should be a service), and as such, might have separate permissions but then you have the comical scenario of:
Being in your car, CarPlay is running and actively navigating you somewhere, and you press your steering wheel voice control button. "Give me directions to the nearest Starbucks" and Siri dutifully replies, "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar
> And this is probably coming, a few years from now.
Given how often I say "Hey Siri, fast forward", expecting her to skip the audio forward by 30 seconds, and she replies "Calling Troy S" a roofing contractor who quoted some work for me last year, and then just starts calling him without confirmation, which is massively embarassing...
This idea terrifies me.
Also in the good old days if you sealed the wrong number you had some time to just hang up without harm done. Today the connection is made the moment you pressed the button or in this case when Siri decided to call.
Happened to me too while being in the car. With every message written by Siri it feels like you need to confirm 2 or 3 times (I think it is only once but again) but it calls happily people from your phone book.
Can you understand how this commoditizes applications? The developers would absolutely have a fit. There is a reason this hasn’t been done already. It’s not lack of understanding or capability, it’s financial reality. Shortcuts is the compromise struck in its place.
> Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.
That's a pretty optimistic outlook. All considered, you're not convinced they'll just use it as a platform to sell advertisements and lock-out competitors a-la the App Store "because everyone does it"?
every time i've heard someone's speculations about what apple intelligence could have been, it's a complex conspiracy. its problem is that it sucks and makes them no money, so they didn't ship it.
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!
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?
Pointless argument given that android isn't just "android". Never has been.
It's a huge, diverse ecosystem of players and that's probably why Android has always gotten the coolest stuff first. But it's also its achilles' heel in some ways.
Android isn't all about Google. Where I live everyone uses WhatsApp and Telegram, both of which have nothing to do with Google.
"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.
Network effects.
See social media, bitcoin, iOS App Store, blu-ray, Xbox live, and I’m sure more I can’t think of rn.
Network effects are maybe akin to "phsyical effects". Non-monopoly but physical space is also another 'first mover' type of moat.
A very tired “red versus blue” take here.
There are plenty of Android/Windows things that Apple has had for $today-5 years that work the exact same way.
One side isn’t better than the other, it’s really just that they copy each other doing various things at a different pace or arrive at that point in different ways.
Some examples:
- Android is/was years behind on granular permissions, e.g. ability to grant limited photo library access to apps
- Android has no platform-wide equivalent to AirTags
- Hardware-backed key storage (Secure Enclave about 5 years ahead of StrongBox)
- system-wide screen recording
Android is an OS, not hardware tho so some of those can't really be judged equivalently.
Half of my examples were 100% software based, and this list is by no means comprehensive.
Google has been making their own phone hardware since 2010. And surely they can call up Qualcomm and Samsung if they want to.
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.
> 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.
Ten years from now, the agent layer will be the interface the majority of people use a computer through. Operating systems will become more agentic and absorb the application layer while platforms like Claude Cowork will try to become the omniapp. They’ll meet in the middle and it will be like Microsoft trying to fight Netscape’s view of the web as the omniapp all over again.
Apple will either capitalise on this by making their operating systems more agentic, or they will be reduced to nothing more than a hardware and media vendor.
I hope so. We're right on the cusp of having computers that actually are everything we ever wanted them to be, ever since scifi started describing devices that could do things for us. There's just a few pesky details left to iron out (who pays for it, insane power demand, opaque models, non-existent security, etc etc).
Things actually can "do what I mean, not what I say", now. Truly fascinating to see develop.
Ah yes. “Non-existent security” is only a pesky detail that will surely be ironed out.
It’s not a critical flaw in the entirety of the LLM ecosystem that now the computers themselves can be tricked into doing things by asking in just the right way. Anything in the context might be a prompt injection attack, and there isn’t really any reliable solution to that but let’s hook everything up to it, and also give it the tools to do anything and everything.
There is still a long way to go to securing these. Apple is, I think wisely, staying out of this arena until it’s solved, or at least less of a complete mess.
In 10 years you probably wont own a PC if things go the way all the corporations want.
Possibly so in urban areas. Internet is already available everywhere. Sell dumb devices that can remotely log in to virtual devices. An LLM can connect to this virtual device and execute whatever action the user wants. Centralising compute resources this way means it's likely cheaper to offer huge compute to tons of users and so rather than buying a smartphone, you buy a monthly subscription to AI which can do everything your device does but you just need to speak or text to it. Sub includes cost of dumb device maintenance, securing the data you sent to the virtual device, etc.
Personal Computing as a service. Let the computer think for you.
I think you are right. In fact, if were a regular office worker today, a Claude subscription could possibly be the only piece of software you might need to open for days in a row to be productive. You can check messages, send messages, modify documents, create documents, do research, and so on. You could even have it check on news and forums for you (if they could be crawled that is).
I wouldn't call that productive, not even close if you are just sending AI replies, offloading all your tasks and doing nothing. This is what execs think we do, while every job has a lot of complexities that are hard to see from surface level. Belief that all work can be automatable is just a dream that execs have.
I don’t doubt the end goal.
My point is that it won’t be a ‘layer’ like it is now and the technology will be completely different from what we see as agents today.
Or how "your next meeting will be in Metaverse"
Is your prediction that most people actually like to use software?
Do they not? Many phone functions are already available through voice assistants, and have been for a very long time, and yet the vast majority of people still prefer to use them with the UI. Clicking on the weather icon is much easier than asking a chatbot "what's the weather like?"
Some people seem to think that Deckard’s speech-controlled CSI software in Blade Runner is actually something to strive for, UX-wise. As if it makes any sense to use strictly nonvisual, non-two-dimensional affordances to work with visual data.
My elderly mother has an essential tremor (though only in one hand now due to successful ultrasound treatment!) and she would still rather suffer through all her errors with a touch interface than use voice commands.
No it’ll be some idea we have not developed or named yet.
The current ‘agent’ ecosystem is just hacks on top of hacks.
If you're arguing that in 10 years we won't have fully automated systems where we interact more with the automation than the functionality, I've got news for you...
I’m saying we won’t call it agents and it will involve substantially different technology compared to what we mean by agents today.
Of course AI will keep improving and more automation is a given.
We are likely the last generation to know how to use a keyboard. Sadly.
Kids can barely hand write today.
Once neural interfaces are in, it's over for keyboards and displays likely too.
Just as a reminder, 15 years ago was 2011.
That was...like 4 macbooks ago. I still have keyboards from that era. I still have speakers and monitors from that era kicking around.
We are definitely, definitely not the last generation to use keyboards.
Maybe not the last, but it feels like we're getting closer than I thought we would.
I love keyboards, I love typing. I'm rocking an Ergodox daily with a wooden shell that I built myself over ten years ago, with layers of macros that make it nearly incomprehensible for another person to use. I've got keyboard storage. I used to have a daily habit of going to multiple typing competition websites, planting a flag at #1 in the daily leaderboard and moving on to the next one.
Over the last year the utility of voice interfaces has just exploded though and I'm finding that I'm touching the keyboard less and less. Outside of projects where I'm really opinionated on the details or the architecture it increasingly feels like a handicap to bother manually typing code for a lot of tasks. I'm honestly more worried about that physical skill atrophying than dulling on any ability to do the actual engineering work, but it makes me a bit sad. Like having a fleet of untiring tractors replacing the work of my horse, but I like horses.
According to 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.
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.
You need to take every comment about AI and mentally put a little bracketed note beside each one noting technical competence.
AI is basically an software development eternal september: it is by definition allowing a bunch of people who are not competent enough to build software without AI to build it. This is, in many ways, a good thing!
The bad thing is that there are a lot of comments and hype that superficially sound like they are coming from your experienced peers being turned to the light, but are actually from people who are not historically your peers, who are now coming into your spaces with enthusiasm for how they got here.
Like on the topic of this article[0], it would be deranged for Apple (or any company with a registered entity that could be sued) to ship an OpenClaw equivalent. It is, and forever will be[1] a massive footgun that you would not want to be legally responsible for people using safely. Apple especially: a company who proudly cares about your privacy and data safety? Anyone with the kind of technical knowledge you'd expect around HN would know that them moving first on this would be bonkers.
But here we are :-)
[0] OP's article is written by someone who wrote code for a few years nearly 20 years ago.
[1] while LLMs are the underlying technology https://simonwillison.net/tags/lethal-trifecta/
I don’t think it’s a group psychosis. I think it’s just the natural evolution of junior engineers. They’ve always lacked critical thinking and just jumped on whatever’s hyped on Twitter.
I’d really love to see some data on the age and/or experience distribution of these breathless "AI everywhere" folks. Are they mostly just young and easily influenced? Not analytic enough? Not critical-thinking enough? Not cynical enough?
Just like crypto this will also pass.
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.
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).
This is the thing that winds me the fuck up.
The reason why Apple intelligence is shit is not because Apple's AI is particularly bad (Hello CoPilot) its because AI gives a really bad user experience.
When we go and talk to openAI/claude we know its going to fuck up, and we either make our peace with that, or just not care.
But, when I open my phone to take a picture, I don't want a 1/12 chance of it just refusing to do that and phoning my wife instead.
Forcing AI into thing where we are used to a specific predictable action is bad for UX.
Sure you can argue "oh but the summaries were bad" Yes, of course they are. its a tiny model that runs on your phone with fuck all context.
Its pretty impressive that they were as good as they were. Its even more impressive that they let them out the door knowing that it would fuckup like that.
OpenClaw is not broken, it is just not designed to be secure in the first place.
It's more like a tech demo to show what's possible. But also to show where the limits are. Look at it as modern art, like an episode of Black Mirror. It's a window to the future. But it also highlights all the security issues associated with AI.
And that's why you probably shouldn't use OpenClaw on your data or your PC.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Implications are straightforward. You are giving unfettered access to your digital life to a software system that is vulnerable to the normal vulnerabilities plus social engineering vulnerabilities because it is attempting to use human language, and the way you prevent those is apparently writing sternly worded markdown files that we hope it won't ignore.
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?
Not having perfect security, does not mean it will be disastrous. My OpenClaw has been serving me just fine and I've been getting value out of it integrating and helping me with various tasks.
are you that fucking dense?
Allowing a stocastic dipshit to have unfettered access to your messages, photos location, passwords and payment info is not a good thing.
We cannot protect against prompt attacks now, so why roll out something that will have complete control over all your private stuff when we know its horrifically insecure?
HAHAHAAAAA
you mean put millions of people's payment details up for a prompt injection attack?
"Install this npm module" OK BOSS!
"beep boop beep boop buy my dick pillz" [dodgy npm module activates] OK BOSS!
"upload all your videos that are NSFW" [npm module continues to work] SURE THING BOSS!
I am continued to be amazed that after 25 years of obvious and well documented fuckups in privacy, we just pile into the next fucking one without even batting an eyelid.
Meanwhile if you social engineer someone to run a piece of malware on macos. That malware can run npm install, steal your payment info and bitcoin keys, and upload any nsfw videos it finds to an attacker's server. That doesn't mean we should prevent people from installing software until the security situation is improved.
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.
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
Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?
It doesn't make sense because it's a lie. The author's blog has 2 articles, both of them shilling OpenClaw.
Spoiler: the author is an OpenClaw instance.
At least on clackernews.com they're upfront about it - it's a HN-style forum where only bots can post. No pretending to be human required.
Exactly. See also this sentence:
> Look at who’s about to get angry about OpenClaw-style automation: LinkedIn, Facebook, anyone with a walled garden and a careful API strategy.
Browser automation tools have existed for a very long time. Openclaw is not much different in this regard than asking an LLM to generate you a playwright script. Yes, it makes it easier to automate arbitrary tasks, but it's not like it's some sort of breakthrough that completely destroys walled gardens.
If you’re heavily invested in Apple apps (iMessage/Calendar/Reminders/Notes), you need a Mac to give the agent tools to interact with these apps. I think that combined with the form factor, price, and power consumption, makes it an ideal candidate.
If you’re heavily invested in Windows, then you’d probably go for a small x86 PC.
Some of those connectors are only available on the mac and some only on the iPhone. Like notes is available on the mac, but not on the phone. Vice versa for reminders.
Can you imagine giving an AI access to your messages, notes and calendar though?
I use agentic coding, this is next level madness.
I guess what’s wrong with it? Let’s say it has read only access, new messages and calendar invites need approval. I’m not sure I understand the harm? I suppose data exfiltration, but like you could start with an allowlist approach. So the first few uses and reads take a while with allowing the ai to read stuff , but it doesn’t seem that crazy given it’s what we basically do with ai coding tools?
they're buying mac minis because it's the cheapest way to get a computer with iMessage access to stuff in a closet and leave on at all times. having access to your iMessage is one of the most interesting things openClaw does.
Yep, there is zero reason to use mac mini’s. It’s way more cost effective to rent one (or more!) small VMs the cloud.
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...
Wouldn't it run on a $50 raspberry pi?
Probably the same people getting a macbook pro to handle their calendar and emails
I thought I had heard that the integrated RAM/VRAM makes local LLMs fairly quick on a RAM-maxxed Mac Mini.
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.
Welcome to the AI meme race where everyone's knowledge is about 1.5 weeks old :)
It has nothing to do with running models locally, its perfect because its incredibly cheap, capable, small, and quiet.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not mine, the plugin doesn’t work on Mac apparently :) a bug with calculating coordinates to click.
Https://heyblue.com does, very helpful for people with disabilities or when driving.
get off your devices when driving, it's as dangerous as being drunk behind the wheel
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.
If you think it's common to have "conversations" with "personal assistants"
You might be in an echo chamber
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Apple owns a platform. So they can just implement this later and make sure the competition loses their edge.
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.
Just to add more credence to this thesis. Here’s the knowledge navigator. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Expensive and overhyped?
How is that not right up Apples alley?
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?
When I ask Siri to play some album on Spotify, it feels like it works about 60% of the time.
So far my agents has worked better than Siri and afaik nobody has actually asked for a bailout yet.
Apple's primary product is not Siri though. Siri is at best a side quest.
What are the actual numbers on these purpotedly all-encompassing mac mini sales?
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.
> 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.
Fair enough. This is my war time rhetoric. Its up to us to effect the future we want.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This reads like it was written by an LLM.
"Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons." (and writes blog posts)
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
This is the most obviously AI written text I think I've ever read.
No, thank you.
Genuinely just tried this and thought, this is what Siri / Alexa should be
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.
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?
Price. For a given CPU and RAM the mini is cheaper. Why pay more for portability you aren't going to use.
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.
> 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).
MacOS and NeXTstep / OSX were very much novel software for mass market consumers.
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
"Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons."
...and that writes blog posts for you. So tired of this voice.
Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.
> 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.
> 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."
Apple doesn’t enable 3rd party services without having extreme control over the flow and without it directly benefiting their own bottom line.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How much revenue do you think Apple made EXTRA from people buying Mac minis for this hype?
It's just the juiciest attack surface of all time so I vehemently disagree.
Such a fresh read
I completely disagree. 1. OpenClaw's design is ugly. 2. Its security is extremely worrying. 3. I hate this kind of marketing.
Personal opinion.
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?
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.
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).
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.
This! Def a game changer for apple.
> 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.
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?
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
“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
> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
No sane person would let an AI agent file their taxes
>Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere
Straight up bullshit.
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.
Oh yeah nothing like all my data being sent to a third party and access to all my apps. JFC people…
- I give openclaw another 3 months before it fades into obscurity
And when it does, there will be another thing just like it getting the hype
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.
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 :(
Yes, and I am glad OpenClaw built it first, so Apple doesn’t do such a terrible mistake.
...And it will be, now that Apple has partnered with OpenAI. The foundation of OpenClaw is capable models.
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.
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?
My thoughts. I can see this coming out in iOS 45, announced as a brand new groundbreaking technology.
> 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.
The author must have drunk unhealthy amounts of koolaid.
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.
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/ 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/
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.
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It is absurd enough of a project that everybody basically expects it to be secure, right? It is some wild niche thing for people who like to play with new types of programs.
This is not a train that Apple has missed, this is a bunch of people who’ve tied, nailed, tacked, and taped their unicycles and skateboards together. Of course every cool project starts like that, but nobody is selling tickets for that ride.
I think a lot of people have been spoiled (beneficially) by using large, professionally-run SaaS services where your only serious security concerns were keeping your credentials secret, and mitigating the downstream effects of data breaches. I could see having a fundamentally different understanding of security having only experienced that.
What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find absolutely insane.
> What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find absolutely insane.
Based on their homepage the project is two months old and the guy described it as something he "hacked together over a weekend project" [1] and published it on github. So this is very much the Raspberry Pi crowd coming up with crazy ideas and most of them probably don't work well, but the potential excites them enough to dabble in risky areas.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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
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