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 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. Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons.
This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been.
Apple had everything: the hardware, the ecosystem, the reputation for “it just works.” 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.
They could have charged $500 more per device and people would have paid 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 ship an AI you’d actually trust with root access to your computer. That trust—built over decades—was their moat.
So why didn’t they?
Maybe they just didn’t see it. That sounds mundane, but it’s probably the most common reason companies miss opportunities. When you’re Apple, you’re thinking about chip design, manufacturing scale, and retail strategy. An open-source project letting AI agents control computers might not ping your radar until it’s already happening.
Or maybe they saw it and decided the risk wasn’t worth it. If you’re Apple, you don’t want your AI agent automatically buying things, posting on social media, or making irreversible decisions. The liability exposure would be enormous. Better to ship something safe and limited than something powerful and unpredictable.
But there’s another dynamic at play. Look at who’s about to get angry about 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, stay in their ecosystem. An AI that can automate away that friction is an existential threat.
If Apple had built this, they’d be fighting Instagram over ToS violations by Tuesday. They’d be testifying in front of Congress about AI agents committing fraud. Every tech platform would be updating their terms to explicitly ban Apple Intelligence.
By letting some third party do it, Apple gets plausible deniability. They’re just selling hardware. Not their fault what people run on it. It’s the same strategy that made them billions in the App Store while maintaining they’re “not responsible for what developers do.”
But I think this is short-term thinking.
Here’s what people miss about moats: they compound. The reason Microsoft dominated PCs wasn’t just that they had the best OS. 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, they could have created the most defensible moat in tech. 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 built an agent that works across your iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Watch seamlessly—something no one else can do.
More importantly, they could have owned the API. Want your service to work with Apple Agent? You play by Apple’s rules. Suddenly Apple isn’t fighting with platforms—they’re the platform that platforms need to integrate with. It’s the App Store playbook all over again, but for the AI era.
The Mac Mini rush is a preview of this future. People want agents. They want automation. They want to pay for it. They’re literally buying extra computers just to run someone else’s AI on Apple’s hardware.
Apple is getting the hardware revenue but missing the platform revenue. That might look smart this quarter. But platform revenue is what built Apple into a $3 trillion company. And platforms are what create trillion-dollar moats.
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. Not because they couldn’t build it—they obviously could—but because they were optimizing for this year’s legal risk instead of next decade’s platform power.
The people buying Mac Minis to run AI agents aren’t just early adopters. They’re showing Apple exactly what product they should have built. Whether Apple is paying attention is another question entirely.