Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere, and it’s not because people suddenly need more coffee table computers.
If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: people buy Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents using the computer. They are installing headless machines whose only job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw, the open source framework that allows you to run Claude, GPT-5, or any model you want to control your computer, has become the best application for Mac hardware. No final cut. Not logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons.
This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been.
Apple had it all: the hardware, the ecosystem, the “it just works” reputation. They could have sent an AI agent that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could actually file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar using your apps, not through a fragile API layer that breaks every update.
They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid for it. The margins would have been obscene. And they would have won the AI race not by building the best model, but by being the only company that could offer AI that you would actually trust with root access to your computer. That trust, built over decades, was his moat.
So why didn’t they do it?
Maybe they just didn’t see it. This sounds mundane, but it’s probably the most common reason companies miss out on opportunities. When you’re Apple, you think about chip design, manufacturing scale, and retail strategy. An open source project that allows AI agents to control computers may not ping your radar until it’s already happening.
Or maybe they saw it and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. If you’re Apple, you don’t want your AI agent to buy things, post on social media, or make irreversible decisions automatically. The liability exposure would be enormous. It is better to send something safe and limited than something powerful and unpredictable.
But there is another dynamic at play. Look who’s about to get upset over OpenClaw-style automation: LinkedIn, Facebook, anyone with a walled garden and a careful API strategy. These services depend on friction. They want you to use their app, see their ads, and stay in their ecosystem. An AI that can automate that friction is an existential threat.
If Apple had built this, they would be fighting Instagram for ToS violations on Tuesday. They would be testifying before Congress about AI agents who committed fraud. All technology platforms would update their terms to explicitly prohibit Apple Intelligence.
By allowing a third party to do it, Apple gets plausible deniability. They only sell hardware. It’s not his fault what people do with him. It’s the same strategy that made them billions on the App Store while maintaining that they are “not responsible for what developers do.”
But I think this is short-term thinking.
This is what people miss about pits: they are composed. The reason Microsoft dominated PCs wasn’t just because they had the best operating system. It’s that everyone built for Windows, which made Windows more valuable, which made more people build for Windows. Network effects.
If Apple owned the agent layer, it could have created the most defensible technology moat. Because an AI agent gets better the more it knows about you. And Apple already has all your data, all your apps, all your devices. They could have created an agent that works perfectly on your iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Watch, something no one else can do.
More importantly, they could have owned the API. Do you want your service to work with Apple Agent? You play by Apple’s rules. Suddenly, Apple is no longer fighting with the platforms: they are the platform with which the platforms must integrate. It’s the App Store playbook all over again, but for the age of AI.
The Mac Mini fever is a preview of this future. People want agents. They want automation. They want to pay for it. They are literally buying extra computers just to run someone else’s AI on Apple hardware.
Apple gets the hardware revenue but loses the platform revenue. This might look smart this quarter. But platform revenue is what turned Apple into a $3 trillion company. And the platforms are what create trillion-dollar moats.
I suspect that ten years from now, people will look to 2024-2025 as the time when Apple had a clear opportunity to own the agent layer and decided not to take advantage of it. Not because they couldn’t build it (they obviously could), but because they were optimizing this year’s legal risk instead of next decade’s platform power.
People buying Mac Minis to run AI agents aren’t just early adopters. They are showing Apple exactly what product they should have built. Whether Apple is paying attention is another question entirely.
