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..
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.
They definitely do. A common configuration is running a supervisor model in the cloud and a much smaller model locally to churn on long running tasks. This frees Openclaw up to lavishly iterate on tool building without running through too many tokens.
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.
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
I'm confused, I thought we were talking about people who are installing and running openclaw. You're right, if this is now a thread about teenage dating habits, I'm out.
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.
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.
> 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”
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?
(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)
If someone is shallow enough to write you off for that, is that someone you want as your partner?
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.