> 1. Running an agent like OpenClaude. The $599 Mac Mini was an insanely good deal for this.

I still have zero clue how "Buy a $599 Mac Mini to have a sandboxed LLM API caller" became the default. If you're not doing local inference and don't need to inject into iMessage or iCloud, all you need to run openclaw-style harnesses that call external APIs is a Raspberry Pi 4B, an N100, an HTPC, or that 10 year old laptop sitting in your desk.

Apple has a huge marketing budget, and evidently, they are not beyond using unethical tactics to sell their products. That's how it started.

People bought the mac mini and then spent more money to have someone install openclaw for them, it was wild.