alt Hacker NewsOpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Genuinely just tried this and thought, this is what Siri / Alexa should be
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's just the juiciest attack surface of all time so I vehemently disagree.
How much revenue do you think Apple made EXTRA from people buying Mac minis for this hype?
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.
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.
This! Def a game changer for apple.
Yes, and I am glad OpenClaw built it first, so Apple doesn’t do such a terrible mistake.
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.
> 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.