[HN Gopher] OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
___________________________________________________________________
OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
Author : jakequist
Score : 486 points
Date : 2026-02-05 00:28 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jakequist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jakequist.com)
| terminalbraid wrote:
| Expensive and overhyped?
| ArchieScrivener wrote:
| How is that not right up Apples alley?
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Because Apple products at least work deterministically
|
| They don't say here is a 1000 $ iphone and there is a 60%
| chance you can successfully message or call a friend
|
| The other 40% well? AGI is right around the corner and can US
| govt pls give me 1 trillion dollar loan and a bailout?
| criddell wrote:
| When I ask Siri to play some album on Spotify, it feels
| like it works about 60% of the time.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Siri is not Apple's MVP though.
| sanex wrote:
| So far my agents has worked better than Siri and afaik
| nobody has actually asked for a bailout yet.
| gafferongames wrote:
| Don't worry, it's coming
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Apple's primary product is not Siri though. Siri is at
| best a side quest.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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?
| throwaway613746 wrote:
| [flagged]
| elictronic wrote:
| Apple had problems with just the Chatbot side of LLMs because
| they couldn't fully control the messaging. Add in a small
| helping of losing your customers entire net worth and yeah.
| These other posters have no idea what they are talking about.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Exactly, Apple is entirely too conservative to shine with
| LLMs due to their uncontrollability, Apple likes their
| control and their version of "protecting people" (which I
| don't fully agree with) which includes "We are way too scared
| to expose our clients to something we can't control and stop
| from doing/saying anything bad!", which may end up being
| prudent. They won't come close to doing something like
| OpenClaw for at least a few more years when the tech is
| (hopefully) safer and/or the Overton Window has shifted.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| And yet they'll push out AI-driven "message summaries" that
| are horrifically bad and inaccurate, often summarizing the
| intent of a message as the complete opposite of the full
| message up to and including "wants to end relationship;
| will see you later"?
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Was about to point out the same thing. Apple's desperate
| rush to market, summarising news headlines badly and
| sometimes just plain hallucinating stuff causing many
| public figured to react when they end up the target of
| such mishaps.
| gordonhart wrote:
| Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw is so far from figuring out the
| "trust" element for agents that it's baffling the OP even chose
| to bring it up in his argument
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is absurd enough of a project that everybody basically
| expects it to be secure, right? It is some wild niche thing for
| people who like to play with new types of programs.
|
| This is not a train that Apple has missed, this is a bunch of
| people who've tied, nailed, tacked, and taped their unicycles
| and skateboards together. Of course every cool project starts
| like that, but nobody is selling tickets for that ride.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I think a lot of people have been spoiled (beneficially) by
| using large, professionally-run SaaS services where your only
| serious security concerns were keeping your credentials
| secret, and mitigating the downstream effects of data
| breaches. I could see having a fundamentally different
| understanding of security having only experienced that.
|
| What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find
| absolutely insane.
| dmix wrote:
| > What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find
| absolutely insane.
|
| Based on their homepage the project is two months old and
| the guy described it as something he "hacked together over
| a weekend project" [1] and published it on github. So this
| is very much the Raspberry Pi crowd coming up with crazy
| ideas and most of them probably don't work well, but the
| potential excites them enough to dabble in risky areas.
|
| [1] https://openclaw.ai/blog/introducing-openclaw
| DrewADesign wrote:
| In my feeds, I've seen activity among several an-LLM-is-
| my-tech-lead-level newly tech-ish people, who are just
| plugging their lives into it and seeing what happens.
|
| If this really was primarily tech savvy people prodding
| at the ecosystem, the top skill available, as of a few
| days ago, probably wouldn't be a malware installer:
|
| https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-
| opencla...
| avaer wrote:
| > 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.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Https://heyblue.com does, very helpful for people with
| disabilities or when driving.
| verdverm wrote:
| get off your devices when driving, it's as dangerous as being
| drunk behind the wheel
| nerdsniper wrote:
| You don't look at it, you just talk to it and it can talk
| back to you. It's more just having a conversation with a
| personal assistant while driving. Which is a pretty common
| thing to do.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| That is nearly as dangerous - it causes inattention
| blindness.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| No, it's really not.
| verdverm wrote:
| Close to 10 deaths per day (>3000 per year) and 10% of
| all traffic fatalities in the US, and you want to claim
| it's not dangerous?
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I'd reckon 9/10 instances of "distracted driving" deaths
| involve texting/looking at the phone. Maybe this could
| reduce those numbers by 90%.
| verdverm wrote:
| Is it so hard to put the phone down for the minutes you
| are driving during? Is it that addicting?
|
| Why is it so imperative to use your phone while behind
| the wheel? Might it be better to use this time to break
| the addiction?
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I am absolutely saying that _your_ claim that conversing
| is nearly as dangerous as looking at your phone, is total
| nonsense. And your link doesn 't do anything to support
| your claim.
| verdverm wrote:
| If you think it's common to have "conversations" with
| "personal assistants"
|
| You might be in an echo chamber
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Having an important phone call while driving is _also_
| pretty dangerous.
|
| Speeding and drunk driving are also pretty common things
| to do despite being dangerous.
|
| Pay attention behind the wheel.
| monkpit wrote:
| Not mine, the plugin doesn't work on Mac apparently :) a bug
| with calculating coordinates to click.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Apple literally lives on the "Cutting Edge" a-la XKCD [1]. My
| wife is an iPerson and she always tells me about these new
| features (my phone has had them since $today-5 years). But for
| her, these are brand new exciting things!
|
| https://xkcd.com/606/
| lukevp wrote:
| How many chat products has Google come out with? Google
| messenger, buzz, wave, meet, Google+, hangouts... Apple has
| iMessage and FaceTime. You just restated OP's point. Apple
| evolves things slowly and comes to market when the problems
| have already been solved in a myriad of ways, so they can be
| solved once and consistently. It's not about coming to market
| soonest. How did you get that from what OP said?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| "It's not about coming to market soonest. "
|
| First Mover effect seems only relevant when goverment
| warrants are involved. Think radio licenses, medical
| patents, etc. Everywhere else, being a first mover doesnt
| seem to correlate like it should to success.
| drBonkers wrote:
| Network effects.
|
| See social media, bitcoin, iOS App Store, blu-ray, Xbox
| live, and I'm sure more I can't think of rn.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Network effects are maybe akin to "phsyical effects".
| Non-monopoly but physical space is also another 'first
| mover' type of moat.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Pointless argument given that android isn't just "android".
| Never has been.
|
| It's a huge, diverse ecosystem of players and that's
| probably why Android has always gotten the coolest stuff
| first. But it's also its achilles' heel in some ways.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Except operating system and security updates...
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Android isn't all about Google. Where I live everyone uses
| WhatsApp and Telegram, both of which have nothing to do
| with Google.
| dangus wrote:
| A very tired "red versus blue" take here.
|
| There are plenty of Android/Windows things that Apple has had
| for $today-5 years that work the exact same way.
|
| One side isn't better than the other, it's really just that
| they copy each other doing various things at a different pace
| or arrive at that point in different ways.
|
| Some examples:
|
| - Android is/was years behind on granular permissions, e.g.
| ability to grant limited photo library access to apps
|
| - Android has no platform-wide equivalent to AirTags
|
| - Hardware-backed key storage (Secure Enclave about 5 years
| ahead of StrongBox)
|
| - system-wide screen recording
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Android is an OS, not hardware tho so some of those can't
| really be judged equivalently.
| dangus wrote:
| Half of my examples were 100% software based, and this
| list is by no means comprehensive.
|
| Google has been making their own phone hardware since
| 2010. And surely they can call up Qualcomm and Samsung if
| they want to.
| eykanal wrote:
| > ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven
| ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
|
| While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while
| since we've seen this model of software development from Apple
| succeed in recent years. I'm not at all confident that the
| Apple that gave us Mac OS 26 is capable of doing this anymore.
| Pediatric0191 wrote:
| Airtags were released in 2021, I'd say that counts, but
| generally I agree.
| atonse wrote:
| Their hardware division has been killing it.
|
| The software has been where most of the complaints have
| been in recent years.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Their software efforts have little ambition. Tweaks and
| improvements are always a good idea, but without some
| ambitious effort, nothing special is learned or achieved.
|
| A "bicycle for the mind" got replaced with a "kiosk for
| your pocketbook".
|
| The Vision Pro has an amazing interface, but it's set up
| as a place to rent videos and buy throwaway novelty iPad-
| style apps. It allows you to import a Mac screen as a
| single window, instead of expanding the Mac interface,
| with its Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial
| world.
|
| Great hardware. Interesting, but locked down software.
|
| If Tim Cook wanted to leave a real legacy product, it
| should have been a Vision Pro aimed as an upgrade on the
| Mac interface and productivity. Apple's new highest end
| interface/device for the future. Not another mid/low-
| capability iPad type device. So close. So far.
|
| $3500 for an enforced toy. (And I say all this as someone
| who still uses it with my Mac, but despairs at the lack
| of software vision.)
| msy wrote:
| Not just lack of ambition, lack of vision or taste.
| Liquid Glass is a step back in almost every way, that it
| got out the door is an indictment of the entire
| leadership chain.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Recently upgraded. Ughhh...it's just so god-awful
| terrible.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I think, then, the correct term would be "updated".
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Not if the idea is to tank old phone performance to sell
| new phone hardware!
| Tagbert wrote:
| That's never a good, long term business model and people
| are willing to pay more for Apple hardware because it
| tends to last longer than others. We've heard this
| cynical take for years, but I don't think that it is
| really convincing.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > It allows you to import a Mac screen as a single
| window, instead of expanding the Mac interface, with its
| Mac power and flexibility, into the spacial world.
|
| I've thought this too. Apple might be one of the only
| companies that could pull off bringing an existing
| consumer operating system into 3D space, and they just...
| didn't.
|
| On Windows, I tried using screen captures to separate
| windows into 3D space, but my 3090 would run out of
| texture space and crash.
|
| Maybe the second best would be some kind of Wayland
| compositor.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Agreed, especially as we all have and use our Vision Pros
| daily.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > Their hardware division has been killing it.
|
| The last truly magical apple device launch was the
| Airpod. They've done a great job on their chipsets, but
| the actual hardware products they make are stagnant, at
| best. The designs of the new laptops have been a step
| back in quality and design in my opinion.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| I mean they literally just looked at Tile. And they have
| the benefit of running the platform. Demonstrates time and
| time again that they engage in anticompetitive behaviour.
| cromka wrote:
| No, they didn't just look at Tile. The used a completely
| new UWB radio technology with a completely new
| anonymization cryptographic paradigm allowing them to
| include every single device in network, transparently.
|
| AirTag is a perfect example of their hardware prowess
| that even Google fails to replicate to this date.
| midtake wrote:
| Best privacy in computers, ADP, and M-series chips mean
| nothing to you? To me, Apple is the last bastion of sanity in
| a world where user hostility is the norm.
| eykanal wrote:
| As said elsewhere, success in hardware does not translate
| to success in software.
|
| Privacy is definitely good but it's not at all an example
| of the success mentioned in the parent comment. It's deep
| in the company culture.
| kaashif wrote:
| Apple is certainly the least worst but man... Liquid Glass.
| Windows bordering on the circular...
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a
| way no other company can.
|
| That's a pretty optimistic outlook. All considered, you're not
| convinced they'll just use it as a platform to sell
| advertisements and lock-out competitors a-la the App Store
| "because everyone does it"?
| iwontberude wrote:
| Can you understand how this commoditizes applications? The
| developers would absolutely have a fit. There is a reason this
| hasn't been done already. It's not lack of understanding or
| capability, it's financial reality. Shortcuts is the compromise
| struck in its place.
| weikju wrote:
| Personal intelligence, the (awkward) feature where you can take
| a screenshot and get Siri to explain stuff, and the new
| spotlight features where you can type out stuff you want to do
| in apps probably hints at that...
| dchuk wrote:
| This is generally true only of them going to market with new
| (to them) physical form factors. They aren't generally regarded
| as the best in terms of software innovation (though I think
| most agree they make very beautiful software)
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| neumann wrote:
| What are you referring to?
| lanakei wrote:
| Probably the Mac Mini. A few OpenClaw users are buying the
| agent a dedicated device so that it can integrate with
| their Apple account.
|
| For example:
| https://x.com/michael_chomsky/status/2017686846910959668.
| koolala wrote:
| Why would it need more than 1? Couldn't they do this with
| any Mac with an Apple account?
| vovavili wrote:
| Mac Minis are perfect for locally running demanding
| models because they can effectively use ordinary RAM as
| VRAM.
| hjoutfbkfd wrote:
| but people dont use OpenClaw with local models
| paunchy wrote:
| 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.
| garciasn wrote:
| Unless you're running a large local model in 192GB+ this
| just won't be ideal, based on real-world experience.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0. https://www.daifi.ai/
| koolala wrote:
| That one definitely looks like a crypto scam.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrel wrote:
| Considering there are 1.5M openclaw agents, created by
| 17,000 humans, it seems like some people really would use
| more than 1.
| hjoutfbkfd wrote:
| if you are counting reported moltbook accounts there are
| not, the API was spammed by scripts to create accounts
| Quarrel wrote:
| This was on HN a few days ago, I wasn't counting
| anything:
|
| https://www.wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltbook-database-
| reveals-mi...
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Are you saying that software is THAT inefficient so that
| you can't run a few hundred of them on a single Mac Mini?
| : D
| karlshea wrote:
| 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.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| That truly cant be it right? This is like satire? How
| much do you even charge for that?
| karlshea wrote:
| Unfortunately not satire, and the answer is $500
| ajcp wrote:
| Mac-Minis
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Do you want to know how I can tell you didn't read the
| article?
| jb1991 wrote:
| Do you want to know how I can tell that you did not read
| the hacker news guidelines.
| jb1991 wrote:
| The entire point of the article is about the Mac mini sales
| flying through the roof because of this.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| 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..
| computershit wrote:
| > Using it for anything serious
|
| One man's trash is another man's serious
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at
| Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless.
|
| I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of.
|
| > Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no
| other company can.
|
| And in the case of Apple products, oftentimes "because Apple
| won't let them".
|
| Lest I be called an Apple hater, I have 3 Apple TVs in my home,
| my daily driver is a M2 Ultra Studio with a ProDisplay XDR, and
| an iPad Pro that shows my calendar and Slack during the day and
| comes off at night. iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra.
|
| But this is way too worshipful of Apple.
| jacinabox wrote:
| Remember the time when the former members of the Siri team
| demoed a prototype for a more capable version of Siri and
| Apple didn't even use it
| ejoso wrote:
| In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them
| match the ops comment? You're saying none of those products
| are or have been in their time in the market a perfected
| version of other things?
|
| There are lots of failed products in nearly every company's
| portfolio.
|
| AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others
| too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| We're talking about Apple Intelligence here and its ...
| "precursor" ... Siri.
|
| Both of which have been absolutely underwhelming if not
| outright laughable in certain ways.
|
| Apple has done plenty right. These two, which are the
| closest to the article, are not it.
| danielheath wrote:
| Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I feel sure that Siri was
| much better a decade ago than it is today. Basic voice
| commands that used to work are no longer recognised, or
| required you to unlock the phone in situations where hands
| free operation is the whole point of using a voice command.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There were certain commands that worked just fine. But
| they, in Apple's way, required you to "discover" what
| worked and what didn't with no hints, and then there were
| illogical gaps like "this grouping should have three
| obvious options, but you can only do one via Siri".
|
| And then some of its misinterpretations were hilariously
| bad.
|
| Even now, I get at a technical level that CarPlay and Siri
| might be separate "apps" (although CarPlay really seems
| like it should be a service), and as such, might have
| separate permissions but then you have the comical scenario
| of:
|
| Being in your car, CarPlay is running and actively
| navigating you somewhere, and you press your steering wheel
| voice control button. "Give me directions to the nearest
| Starbucks" and Siri dutifully replies, "Sorry, I don't know
| where you are."
| huwsername wrote:
| I don't believe this was ever confirmed by Apple, but there was
| widespread speculation at the time[1] that the delay was due to
| the very prompt injection attacks OpenClaw users are now
| discovering. It would be genuinely catastrophic to ship an
| insecure system with this kind of data access, even with an
| 'unsafe mode'.
|
| These kinds of risks can only be _consented to_ by technical
| people who correctly understand them, let alone borne by them,
| but if this shipped there would be thousands of Facebook videos
| explaining to the elderly how to disable the safety features
| and open themselves up to identity theft.
|
| The article also confuses me because Apple _are_ shipping this,
| it's pretty much exactly the demo they gave at WWDC24, it's
| just delayed while they iron this out (if that is at all
| possible). By all accounts it might ship as early as next week
| in the iOS 26.4 beta.
|
| [1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/8/delaying-
| personalized-s...
| anon373839 wrote:
| Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult
| to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech
| is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever
| Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily
| guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they
| can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into
| fire trucks.
| dmix wrote:
| This is so obvious I'm kind of surprised the author used to
| be a software engineer at Google (based on his Linkedin).
|
| OpenClaw is very much a greenfield idea and there's plenty
| of startups like Raycast working in this area.
| ljm wrote:
| I'm not that surprised because of how pervasive the 'move
| fast and break things' culture is in Silicon Valley, and
| what is essentially AI accelerationism. You see this
| reflected all over HN as well, e.g. when Cloudflare goes
| down and it's a good thing because it gives you a break
| from the screen. Who cares that it broke? That's just how
| it is.
|
| This is just not how software engineering goes in many
| other places, particularly where the stakes are much
| higher and can be life altering, if not threatening.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Being good at leetcode grinding isn't the same as being a
| good product person.
| boringg wrote:
| shots fired!
| fsloth wrote:
| Ouch. You could have taken a statistical approach "google
| is not known for high quality product development and
| likely therefore does not select candidates for qualities
| in product-development domain" - I'm talking too much to
| Gemini, aren't I?
| waffletower wrote:
| iOS 26 is proof that _many_ product managers at Apple
| need to find another calling. The usability
| enshittification in that release is severe and
| embarrassing.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Or maybe, while being as good as they are at their jobs,
| they were forced to follow a broken vision with a non-
| negotiable release date.
|
| And simply chose to keep their jobs.
| 9rx wrote:
| It is obvious if viewed through an Apple lens. It
| wouldn't be so obvious if viewed through a Google lens.
| Google doesn't hesitate to throw whatever its got out
| there to see what sticks; quickly cancelling anything
| that doesn't work out, even if some users come to love
| the offering.
| puppymaster wrote:
| Regardless of how Apple will solve this, please just solve
| it. Siri is borderline useless these days.
|
| > Will it rain today? Please unlock your iphone for that
|
| > Any new messages from Chris? You will need to unlock your
| iphone for that
|
| > Please play youtube music Playing youtube music... please
| open youtube music app to do that
|
| All settings and permission granted. Utterly painful.
| blks wrote:
| Do you want people being able to command your phone
| without unblocking? Maybe what you want is to disable
| phone blocking all together
| anhner wrote:
| Oh no, what if they put on Christmas music playlist in
| February? the horror!
|
| There should exist something between "don't allow
| anything without unlocking phone first" and "leave the
| phone unlocked for anyone to access", like "allow certain
| voice commands to be available to anyone even with phone
| locked"
| Anelya wrote:
| Can it not recognize my voice? I had to record the
| pronunciation of 100 words when I setup my new iPhone -
| isn't there a voice signature pattern that could be the
| key to unlock?
| anhner wrote:
| It certainly should have been a feature up until now.
| However, I think at this point anyone can clone your
| voice and bypass it.
|
| But as a user I want to be able to give it permission to
| run selected commands even with the phone locked. Like I
| don't care if someone searches google for something or
| puts a song via spotify. If I don't hide notifications
| when locked, what does it matter that someone who has my
| phone reads them or listens to them?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Personal Voice learns to synthesize your voice, not to
| identify it.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Playing music doesn't require unlocking though, at least
| not from the Music app. If YouTube requires an unlock
| that's actually a setting YouTube sets in their SiriKit
| configuration.
|
| For reading messages, IIRC it depends on whether you have
| text notification previews enabled on the lock screen
| (they don't document this anywhere that I can see.) The
| logic is that if you block people from seeing your texts
| from the lock screen without unlocking your device, Siri
| should be blocked from reading them too.
|
| Edit: Nope, you're right. I just enabled notification
| previews for Messages on the lock screen and Siri still
| requires an unlock. That's a bug. One of many, many, many
| Siri bugs that just sort of pile up over time.
| eisfresser wrote:
| Not really. Giving the weather forecast or playing music
| seems pretty low risk to me.
| schnable wrote:
| Siri doesnt make me unlock the phone to give a weather
| report.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I want a voice control experience that is functional. I
| don't want every bad thing that could happen-- especially
| those that will only happen if I'm careless to begin
| with-- circumscribing an ever shrinking range, often
| justified by contrived examples and/or for things much
| more easily accomplished through other methods.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| That would be very useful but is not a trivial problem.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Probably need VoiceID so only authorized people can talk
| to it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Right, but you understand why allowing access to
| unauthenticated voice is bad for security right?
| anhner wrote:
| But you understand why if I don't care about that, I
| should be able to run it, right?
| pixl97 wrote:
| I understand why you'd want to do it.
|
| Oddly enough I also understand Apple telling you, good
| luck, find someones platform that will allow that, that's
| not us.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| you can, you can turn locking off.
|
| But the point is, you are a power user, who has some
| understanding of the risk. You know that if your phone is
| stolen and it has any cards stored on them, they can be
| easily transferred to another phone and drained. Because
| your bank will send a confirmation code, and its still
| authorized, you will be held liable for that fraud.
|
| THe "man in the street" does not know that, and needs
| some level of decent safe defaults to avoid such fraud.
| ramses0 wrote:
| re: youtube music, I just tried it on my phone and it
| worked fine... maaaybe b/c you're not a youtube premium
| subscriber and google wants to shove ads into your sweet
| sweet eyeballs?
|
| The one that kindof caught me off guard was asking "hey
| siri, how long will it take me to get home?" => "You'll
| need to unlock your iPhone for that, but I don't
| recommend doing that while driving..." => if you left
| your phone unattended at a bar and someone could figure
| out your home address w/o unlock.
|
| ...I'm kindof with you, maybe similar to AirTags and
| "Trusted Locations" there could be a middle ground of
| "don't worry about exposing rough geolocation or summary
| PII". At home, in your car (connected to a known
| CarPlay), kindof an in-between "Geo-Unlock"?
| bobchadwick wrote:
| I pay for YouTube Music and I see really inconsistent
| behavior when asking Siri to play music. My five-year-old
| kid is really into an AI slop song that claims to be from
| the KPop Daemon Hunters 2 soundtrack, called Bloodline
| (can we talk about how YT Music in full of trashy rip-off
| songs?). He's been asking to listen to it every day this
| week in the car and prior to this morning, saying "listen
| to kpop daemon hunters bloodline" would work fine,
| playing it via YT Music. This morning, I tried every
| iteration of that request I could think of and I was
| never able to get it to play. Sometimes I'd get the
| response that I had to open YT Music to continue, and
| other times it would say it was playing, but it would
| never actually queue it up. This is a pretty regular
| issue I see. I'm not sure if the problem is with Siri or
| YT Music.
| schnable wrote:
| I think half your examples are made up, or not Apple's
| fault, but it sounds like what you really want is to
| disable your passcode.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| "Will it rain today? Sorry, I can't do that while you're
| driving."
| collingreen wrote:
| I LOVE the "complaining about apple ux? no way, YOU'RE
| the problem / you're doing it wrong / you must not be a
| mac person".
|
| Thanks for keeping this evergreen trope going strong!
| schnable wrote:
| well if you're making complaints that aren't true, or
| asking for functionality that exists already, your
| complaints don't seem very credible to me.
| bgentry wrote:
| You'll need to unlock your iPhone first. Even though
| you're staring at the screen and just asked me to do
| something, and you saw the unlocked icon at the top of
| your screen before/while triggering me, please continue
| staring at this message for at least 5 seconds before I
| actually attempt FaceID to unlock your phone to do what
| you asked.
| afro88 wrote:
| I think you're being very generous. There's almost 0 chance
| they had this actually working consistently enough for
| general use in 2024. Security is also a reason, but there's
| no security to worry about if it doesn't really work yet
| anyway
| mastermage wrote:
| The more interesting question I have is if such Prompt
| Injection Attacks can ever be actualy avoided, with how GenAI
| works.
| larodi wrote:
| Perhaps not, and it is indeed not unwise from Apple to stay
| away for a while given their ultra-focus on security.
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| They could be if models were trained properly, with more
| carefully delineated prompts.
| arw0n wrote:
| I'd be super interested in more information on this! Do
| you mean abandoning unsupervised learning completely?
|
| Prompt Injection seems to me to be a fundamental problem
| in the sense that data and instructions are in the same
| stream and there's no clear/simple way to differentiate
| between the two at runtime.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Removing the risk for most jobs should be possible. Just
| build the same cages other apps already have. Also add a
| bit more transparency, so people know better what the
| machine is doing, maybe even with a mandatory user-
| acknowledge for potential problematic stuff, similar to how
| we have root-access-dialogues now. I mean, you don't really
| need access to all data, when you are just setting a clock,
| or playing music.
| codeulike wrote:
| Its hard to come up with useful AI apps that aren't massive
| security or privacy risks. This is pretty obvious. For an
| agent to be really useful it needs to have access to
| [important stuff] but giving an AI access to [important
| stuff] is very risky. So you can get some janky thing like
| OpenClaw thats thrown together by one guy and has no
| boundaries and everyone on HN thinks is great, but its going
| to be very difficult for a big firm to make a product like
| that for mass consumption without it risking a massive
| disaster. You can see that Apple and Microsoft and Salesforce
| and everyone are all wrestling with this. Current LLMs are
| too easily hoodwinked.
| cromka wrote:
| File taxes? That's a tall order, especially juxtaposed with
| managing calendar or responding to emails.
| rl3 wrote:
| > _File taxes?_
|
| Sure why not, what could go wrong?
|
| "Siri, find me a good tax lawyer."
|
| "Your honor, my client's AI agent had no intent to willfully
| evade anything."
| vips7L wrote:
| These people live on another planet.
| rl3 wrote:
| It seems to be a common place of residence lately.
| gyomu wrote:
| Tax filing is trivial in most countries with a functioning
| government, it's only a Big Deal in the US due to Intuit
| bribing the government.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Even in the US, for most people tax filing it not really a
| complex process. It only gets complicated if you are trying
| to itemize deductions and have a complex income story. Most
| people can do it with a couple of documents and a single
| form.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| It doesn't take a lot of 'complexity' in income to
| balloon up complexity. Any brokerage activity will
| generate quite a few additional forms for 1099-B,
| 1099-DIV, etc. Still not super complicated, but I keep
| seeing people discuss this as if you only have W2s and
| nothing else... which isn't usually true, especially for
| someone who is likely to be using OpenClaw.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Absolutely none of the things you quoted that he said an AI
| agent could do would I want be done for me and I doubt most
| other people would.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It would be an absolute disaster at Apple scale. Millions of
| people would start using it, filing incorrect taxes or
| deleting their important files and Apple would be sued
| endlessly.
|
| Tiny open source projects can just say "use at your own risk"
| and offload all responsibility.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to
| emails, or manage your calendar
|
| > And this is probably coming, a few years from now.
|
| Given how often I say "Hey Siri, fast forward", expecting her
| to skip the audio forward by 30 seconds, and she replies
| "Calling Troy S" a roofing contractor who quoted some work for
| me last year, and then just starts calling him without
| confirmation, which is massively embarassing...
|
| This idea terrifies me.
| larusso wrote:
| Also in the good old days if you sealed the wrong number you
| had some time to just hang up without harm done. Today the
| connection is made the moment you pressed the button or in
| this case when Siri decided to call.
|
| Happened to me too while being in the car. With every message
| written by Siri it feels like you need to confirm 2 or 3
| times (I think it is only once but again) but it calls
| happily people from your phone book.
| treetalker wrote:
| >> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
|
| Imagine if the government would just tell everyone how much
| they owed and obviated _the need for effing literal artificial
| intelligence_ to get taxes done!
|
| >> respond to emails
|
| If we have an AI that can respond properly to emails, then the
| email doesn't need to be sent in the first place. (Indeed, many
| do not need to be sent nowadays either!)
| techpression wrote:
| Yeah the whole filing taxes thing is an epic XY-problem.
| Governments can make this as easy as a digital signature,
| there's zero need for an agent of any kind.
|
| Actually most of the things people use it for is of this
| kind, instead actually solving the problem (which is out of
| scope for them to be fair) it's just adding more things on
| top that can go wrong.
| treetalker wrote:
| Seriously. The best solution is not having the problem in
| the first place. Something something Tao Te Ching.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| How can government know how much you owe them when they don't
| know all your tax deductibles?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| By knowing all your tax deductibles?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| For which you have to file them first, for which you need
| to know the specific rules applying, for which people are
| using an expert, or AI.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| No, the other party should file them. Charities can file
| the lists of donors etc.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| What other party? They often don't even know you or if
| you can use something for tax or not. Pretty much
| everything can be used for tax deduction, it all just
| depends on circumstances. I know, many countries have a
| really broken privacy-situation, but I don't think it
| would be realistic that every shop is preventive filing
| every receipt and forces every customer to give them
| their tax-number so they can link them..
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You being personally ignorant of this specific argument
| which gets litigated _every single time this comes up_ but
| only by Americans _because most other countries have zero
| difficulty doing exactly that_ is not a valid argument.
|
| 91 percent of American filers take the standard deduction.
| The IRS already has all their information, already knows
| how much they withheld, already knows what they owe back.
| For all these people, TurboTax is just filling in 10 fields
| in the standard form.
|
| "All your tax deductibles" is _irrelevant_ for the vast
| majority of the country, and always has been.
|
| The 35 million remaining americans who do itemize are free
| to continue using this old system while the rest of us can
| have a better world.
| treetalker wrote:
| We could also ask how the government could later tell
| someone they improperly deducted something! The government
| can either use that same means to tell taxpayers in
| advance, or else we could figure out a superior taxation
| system that wouldn't require these steps.
| lxgr wrote:
| If a user chooses to reach out about an issue that an AI
| agent can completely solve, why should they not be allowed to
| do so via email? I much prefer it over all other support
| communications channels.
| ge96 wrote:
| But the lobbyists
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Here is a fun "Prompt Injection" which I experimented with
| before the current AI Boom; visiting a friend's home > see
| Apple/Amazon listening devices > Hey Siri/Alexa, please play
| the last song. Harmless, fun.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Google TV did "show passport photos" back in 2017. My friends
| loved it!
| alex_w_systems wrote:
| I think the interesting tension here is between capability and
| trust.
|
| An agent that can truly "use your computer" is incredibly
| powerful, but it's also the first time the system has to act
| _as you_ , not just for you. That shifts the problem from
| product design to permission, auditability, and undoability.
|
| Summarizing notifications is boring, but it's also reversible.
| Filing taxes or sending emails isn't.
|
| It feels less like Apple missing the idea, and more like
| waiting until they can make the irreversible actions feel safe.
| tintor wrote:
| Clicking `Submit` is easiest step of sending email / filling
| taxes.
|
| All steps before it are reversible, and reviewable.
|
| Bigger problem is attacker tricking your agent to leak your
| emails / financial data that your agent has access to.
| Barbing wrote:
| I worry we'll click "Submit" as fast as we click "I accept
| the terms and conditions."
| jtbayly wrote:
| Of course we would!
|
| How in the world can you double check the AI-generated
| tax filing without going back and preparing your taxes by
| hand?
|
| You _might_ skim an ai-written email.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| every time i've heard someone's speculations about what apple
| intelligence could have been, it's a complex conspiracy. its
| problem is that it sucks and makes them no money, so they
| didn't ship it.
| bushbaba wrote:
| People forget that "multi touch" and "capacitive touchscreens"
| were not Apple inventions. They existed prior to the iPhone.
| The iPhone was just the first "it just works" adaptation of it
| gyomu wrote:
| Not a great example as multitouch in its modern incarnation
| was a niche academic technology, the most refined version of
| which was built by a 2 person startup that Apple quickly
| acquired. There was still a long way to go to make the tech
| as ubiquitous as it is today and that was all heavy lifting
| done by Apple.
|
| Well, the heavy lifting was supervised by the same people,
| but while receiving Apple paychecks :)
| uh_uh wrote:
| > Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products.
| It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
|
| Funny seeing this repeated again in response to Siri which is
| just... not very good.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| hey siri can set the egg timer 90% of the time corectly! Find
| me another multitrillion dollar company that is able to pull
| that off!
|
| .
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| I would guess, and it is a guess, that there are two reasons
| apple is "behind" in AI. First, they have nowhere near the
| talent pool or capability in this area. They're not a technical
| research lab. For the same reason you don't expect apple to win
| the quantum race, they will not lead on AI. Second, AI is a
| half baked product right now and apple try to ship products
| that properly work. Even Vision Pro is remarkably polished for
| a first version. AI on the other hand is likely to suffer
| catastrophic security problems, embarrassing behaviour,
| distinctly family-unfriendly output.
|
| Apple probably realised they were hugely behind and then spent
| time hand wringing over whether they remained cautious or got
| into the brawl. And they decided to watch from the sidelines,
| buy in some tech, and see how it develops.
|
| So far that looks entirely reasonable as a decision. If Claude
| wins, for example, apple need only be sure Claude tools work on
| Mac to avoid losing users, and they can second-move once things
| are not so chaotic.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| >It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer
| version.
|
| I think you repeated their marketing, I don't believe this is
| actually true.
| _se wrote:
| How do people manage to pick such bad examples? Who in their
| right mind would ever allow an LLM to FILE THEIR TAXES for
| them. Absolutely insane behavior. Why would anyone think this
| is probably coming? Do you think the IRS is going to accept
| "hallucination lol" as an excuse for misfiling?
| yohannparis wrote:
| Because private taxe filling software, like used in the USA,
| are exempt from filling errors?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If you're quick at responding and fixing the problem, the IRS
| forgives much..
| LoganDark wrote:
| > Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products.
| It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.
|
| Apple doesn't take proven ones of anything. What they do is
| arrive at something proven from first principles. Everyone else
| did it faster because they borrowed, but Apple did it from
| scratch, with all the detail-oriented UX niceties that entails.
|
| This was more prevalent when Jobs was still around. Apple still
| has some of that philosophy at its core, but it's been eroding
| over time (for example with "AI" and now Liquid Ass). They
| still do their own QA, though, and so on. They're not copying
| the market, they have their own.
| debatem1 wrote:
| > Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
|
| If you trust openclaw to file your taxes we are just on
| radically different levels of risk tolerance.
| fooker wrote:
| > 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.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Or how "your next meeting will be in Metaverse"
| fooker wrote:
| Good example.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Hoping that LLMs go the way of the Metaverse.
| fnord77 wrote:
| there is little chance of that, especially with people
| running them locally
| puszczyk wrote:
| Why? What don't you like about them?
| recursive wrote:
| Not who you asked, but I don't like the effect they have
| on people. People develop dependence on them at the cost
| of their own skills. I have two problems with that. A lot
| of their outputs are factually incorrect, but confidently
| stated. They project an air of trustworthiness seemingly
| more effectively than a used care salesman. My other
| problem is farther-looking. Once everyone is sufficiently
| hooked, and the enshittification begins, whoever is
| pulling the strings on these models will be able to
| silently direct public sentiment from under cover. People
| are increasingly outsourcing their own decisions to these
| machines.
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| exactly. People are blindly dumping everything into LLMs.
| A few years into the future, will we have Sr or Staff
| enggs who can fix things themselves? What happens when
| claude has an outage and there is a prod issue?!
|
| PRs these days are all AI slop.
| podnami wrote:
| Is your prediction that most people actually like to use
| software?
| fooker wrote:
| No it'll be some idea we have not developed or named yet.
|
| The current 'agent' ecosystem is just hacks on top of hacks.
| flexagoon wrote:
| Do they not? Many phone functions are already available
| through voice assistants, and have been for a very long time,
| and yet the vast majority of people still prefer to use them
| with the UI. Clicking on the weather icon is much easier than
| asking a chatbot "what's the weather like?"
| Brybry wrote:
| My elderly mother has an essential tremor (though only in
| one hand now due to successful ultrasound treatment!) and
| she would _still_ rather suffer through all her errors with
| a touch interface than use voice commands.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Some people seem to think that Deckard's speech-controlled
| CSI software in Blade Runner is actually something to
| strive for, UX-wise. As if it makes any sense to use
| strictly nonvisual, non-two-dimensional affordances to work
| with visual data.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The sad part is that while everyone is chasing new
| interface modalities, the traditional 2D UI is slowly
| getting worse thanks to questionable design trends and a
| lack of interest.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you're arguing that in 10 years we won't have fully
| automated systems where we interact more with the automation
| than the functionality, I've got news for you...
| fooker wrote:
| I'm saying we won't call it agents and it will involve
| substantially different technology compared to what we mean
| by agents today.
|
| Of course AI will keep improving and more automation is a
| given.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Ten years from now, the agent layer will be the interface the
| majority of people use a computer through. Operating systems
| will become more agentic and absorb the application layer while
| platforms like Claude Cowork will try to become the omniapp.
| They'll meet in the middle and it will be like Microsoft trying
| to fight Netscape's view of the web as the omniapp all over
| again.
|
| Apple will either capitalise on this by making their operating
| systems more agentic, or they will be reduced to nothing more
| than a hardware and media vendor.
| oidar wrote:
| I think you are right. In fact, if were a regular office
| worker today, a Claude subscription could possibly be the
| only piece of software you might need to open for days in a
| row to be productive. You can check messages, send messages,
| modify documents, create documents, do research, and so on.
| You could even have it check on news and forums for you (if
| they could be crawled that is).
| falloutx wrote:
| I wouldn't call that productive, not even close if you are
| just sending AI replies, offloading all your tasks and
| doing nothing. This is what execs think we do, while every
| job has a lot of complexities that are hard to see from
| surface level. Belief that all work can be automatable is
| just a dream that execs have.
| fooker wrote:
| I don't doubt the end goal.
|
| My point is that it won't be a 'layer' like it is now and the
| technology will be completely different from what we see as
| agents today.
| nilamo wrote:
| I hope so. We're right on the cusp of having computers that
| actually are everything we ever wanted them to be, ever since
| scifi started describing devices that could do things for us.
| There's just a few pesky details left to iron out (who pays
| for it, insane power demand, opaque models, non-existent
| security, etc etc).
|
| Things actually can "do what I mean, not what I say", now.
| Truly fascinating to see develop.
| snailmailman wrote:
| Ah yes. "Non-existent security" is only a pesky detail that
| will surely be ironed out.
|
| It's not a critical flaw in the entirety of the LLM
| ecosystem that now the computers themselves can be tricked
| into doing things by asking in just the right way. Anything
| in the context might be a prompt injection attack, and
| there isn't really any reliable solution to that but let's
| hook _everything_ up to it, and also give it the tools to
| do anything and everything.
|
| There is still a long way to go to securing these. Apple
| is, I think wisely, staying out of this arena until it's
| solved, or at least less of a complete mess.
| mastermage wrote:
| I think he was being sarcastic
| vimda wrote:
| Poe's Law strikes again
| nilamo wrote:
| Yes, there are some flaws. The first airplanes also had
| some flaws, and crashed more often than they didn't. That
| doesn't change how incredible it is, while it's
| improving.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, this thing that was, until recently,
| just research papers, is not actually a finished product
| right now? Incredibly hot take, I know.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the airplane analogy is apt because commercial
| air travel basically capped out at "good enough" in terms
| of performance (just below Mach 1) a long time ago and
| focused on cost. Everyone assumes AI is going to keep
| getting better, but what if we're nearing the performance
| ceiling of LLMs and the rest is just cost optimization?
| mrkstu wrote:
| So they need to finally finish Knowledge Navigator...
| mrkstu wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=welKoeoK6zI
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| I think in 10 years your pc will be more locked down than
| your iPhone.
| falloutx wrote:
| In 10 years you probably wont own a PC if things go the way
| all the corporations want.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Possibly so in urban areas. Internet is already available
| everywhere. Sell dumb devices that can remotely log in to
| virtual devices. An LLM can connect to this virtual device
| and execute whatever action the user wants. Centralising
| compute resources this way means it's likely cheaper to
| offer huge compute to tons of users and so rather than
| buying a smartphone, you buy a monthly subscription to AI
| which can do everything your device does but you just need
| to speak or text to it. Sub includes cost of dumb device
| maintenance, securing the data you sent to the virtual
| device, etc.
|
| Personal Computing as a service. Let the computer think for
| you.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Not my operating system.
| keyle wrote:
| We are likely the last generation to know how to use a
| keyboard. Sadly.
|
| Kids can barely hand write today.
|
| Once neural interfaces are in, it's over for keyboards and
| displays likely too.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Just as a reminder, 15 years ago was 2011.
|
| That was...like 4 macbooks ago. I still have keyboards from
| that era. I still have speakers and monitors from that era
| kicking around.
|
| We are definitely, _definitely_ not the last generation to
| use keyboards.
| llbbdd wrote:
| Maybe not the last, but it feels like we're getting closer
| than I thought we would.
|
| I love keyboards, I love typing. I'm rocking an Ergodox
| daily with a wooden shell that I built myself over ten
| years ago, with layers of macros that make it nearly
| incomprehensible for another person to use. I've got
| keyboard storage. I used to have a daily habit of going to
| multiple typing competition websites, planting a flag at #1
| in the daily leaderboard and moving on to the next one.
|
| Over the last year the utility of voice interfaces has just
| exploded though and I'm finding that I'm touching the
| keyboard less and less. Outside of projects where I'm
| really opinionated on the details or the architecture it
| increasingly feels like a handicap to bother manually
| typing code for a lot of tasks. I'm honestly more worried
| about that physical skill atrophying than dulling on any
| ability to do the actual engineering work, but it makes me
| a bit sad. Like having a fleet of untiring tractors
| replacing the work of my horse, but I _like_ horses.
| chatmasta wrote:
| > 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.
| sanex wrote:
| I don't think it's hardware differentiation as much as vendor
| lock in because it lets people send iMessages with their agent.
| Not sure about the running local models on it though.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Because people are forced to buy them. Same as how datacenters
| are full of mac minis to build iOS apps that could easily be
| built on any hardware if Apple weren't such corporate bastards.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Saved you a click. This is the premise of the article.
| krackers wrote:
| Why specifically mac mini? There are cheaper NUCs and it's not
| like they're running a local model on the mac mini are they?
| atommclain wrote:
| I believe it's to integrate with iMessage, Calendar,
| Reminders etc.
| mh2266 wrote:
| it's so that your agent can access your 2fa codes sent over
| messages
|
| no, seriously, that is a thing people are using it for
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| Openclaw is a nice thing?
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| What it is supposed to do is nice, separate from the risks.
| ankit219 wrote:
| > 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.
| IcyWindows wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I had a dark thought today, that AI agents are going to make
| scam factory jobs obsolete. I don't think this will decrease
| the number of forced labor kidnappings though, since there are
| many things AI agents will not be good at.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I feel like I'm watching group psychosis where people are just
| following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and
| the potential money involved override all self preservation
| instincts in some people.
|
| It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are
| infecting the entire industry.
| csomar wrote:
| Just like crypto this will also pass.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Crypto hasn't really passed. It's just not talked about on
| HN anymore. It is still a massive industry but they have
| dropped the rhetoric of democratising banking and instead
| let you use cryptocurrency to do things like betting on US
| invading Venezuela and so on.
| Sharlin wrote:
| By "passing" the GP presumably meant that the _fad_ phase
| has passed. The hype cycle has reached the natural
| plateau of "I guess this has some use cases" (though in
| this case mostly less-than-scrupulous ones).
| SCdF wrote:
| Blockchain as a vehicle for immutable data has passed.
| Crypto has given up pretending it's anything other than a
| financial vehicle for gambling.
|
| Also, the recruitment attempts I've gotten from crypto
| have completely disappeared compared to the peak (it's
| all AI startups now).
| recursive wrote:
| Maybe now "crypto" can go back to meaning cryptography.
| SCdF wrote:
| You need to take every comment about AI and mentally put a
| little bracketed note beside each one noting technical
| competence.
|
| AI is basically an software development eternal september: it
| is by definition allowing a bunch of people who are not
| competent enough to build software without AI to build it.
| This is, in many ways, a good thing!
|
| The bad thing is that there are a lot of comments and hype
| that superficially sound like they are coming from your
| experienced peers being turned to the light, but are actually
| from people who are not historically your peers, who are now
| coming into your spaces with enthusiasm for how they got
| here.
|
| Like on the topic of this article[0], it would be deranged
| for Apple (or any company with a registered entity that could
| be sued) to ship an OpenClaw equivalent. It is, and forever
| will be[1] a massive footgun that you would not want to be
| legally responsible for people using safely. Apple
| especially: a company who proudly cares about your privacy
| and data safety? Anyone with the kind of technical knowledge
| you'd expect around HN would know that them moving first on
| this would be bonkers.
|
| But here we are :-)
|
| [0] OP's article is written by someone who wrote code for a
| few years nearly 20 years ago.
|
| [1] while LLMs are the underlying technology
| https://simonwillison.net/tags/lethal-trifecta/
| dbbk wrote:
| I don't think it's a group psychosis. I think it's just the
| natural evolution of junior engineers. They've always lacked
| critical thinking and just jumped on whatever's hyped on
| Twitter.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I'd really love to see some data on the age and/or
| experience distribution of these breathless "AI everywhere"
| folks. Are they mostly just young and easily influenced?
| Not analytic enough? Not critical-thinking enough? Not
| _cynical_ enough?
| acdha wrote:
| It's a group psychosis fueled by enormous financial
| pressure: every big tech company has been telling people
| that they're getting fired as soon as possible unless
| they're one of the few people who can operate these tools.
| Of course that's going to have a bunch of people saying
| "Pick me! Pick me!" -- especially since SV has become
| increasingly untethered from questions like whether
| something is profitably benefiting customers. With the
| focus on juicing share prices before moving to the
| distilled fiat pricing of cryptocurrency, we have at least
| two generations of tech workers being told that the path to
| phenomenal wealth comes from talking up your project until
| you find a rich buyer.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| This is the thing that winds me the fuck up.
|
| The reason why Apple intelligence is shit is not because
| Apple's AI is particularly bad (Hello CoPilot) its because AI
| gives a really bad user experience.
|
| When we go and talk to openAI/claude we know its going to fuck
| up, and we either make our peace with that, or just not care.
|
| But, when I open my phone to take a picture, I don't want a
| 1/12 chance of it just refusing to do that and phoning my wife
| instead.
|
| Forcing AI into thing where we are used to a specific
| predictable action is bad for UX.
|
| Sure you can argue "oh but the summaries were bad" Yes, of
| course they are. its a tiny model that runs on your phone with
| fuck all context.
|
| Its pretty impressive that they were as good as they were. Its
| even more impressive that they let them out the door knowing
| that it would fuckup like that.
| andix wrote:
| OpenClaw is not broken, it is just not designed to be secure in
| the first place.
|
| It's more like a tech demo to show what's possible. But also to
| show where the limits are. Look at it as modern art, like an
| episode of Black Mirror. It's a window to the future. But it
| also highlights all the security issues associated with AI.
|
| And that's why you probably shouldn't use OpenClaw on your data
| or your PC.
| semiquaver wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand this take. What makes OP think that
| the company that failed so utterly to even deliver mediocre AI --
| siri is stuck in 2015! -- would be up to the task of delivering
| something as bonkers as Clawdbot?
| chefsweaty wrote:
| My thoughts. I can see this coming out in iOS 45, announced as
| a brand new groundbreaking technology.
| yalogin wrote:
| Apple doesn't enable 3rd party services without having extreme
| control over the flow and without it directly benefiting their
| own bottom line.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| How much revenue do you think Apple made EXTRA from people buying
| Mac minis for this hype?
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| 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.
| camillomiller wrote:
| "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to
| focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no
| to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick
| carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as
| the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
|
| Steve Jobs
| ozten wrote:
| Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to
| repair.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| ajcp wrote:
| As someone who has spent a good portion of my career in the
| RPA/intelligent automation field this take was a spit-coffee-
| close-laptop moment.
| RyanShook wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| b1temy wrote:
| > 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.
| username223 wrote:
| > consumers realising the limits of "AI",
|
| This is my guess for the demand side: most people will drift
| away as the novelty wears off and they don't find it useful in
| their daily lives. It's more a "fading point" than a "breaking
| point."
|
| From the investment/speculation side: something will go
| dramatically against the narrative. OpenAI's attempted
| "liquidity event" of an IPO looks like WeWork as investors get
| a look at the numbers, Oracle implodes in a mountain of debt,
| NVidia cuts back on vendor financing and some major public
| players (e.g. Coreweave) die in a fire. This one will be a
| "breaking point."
| keyle wrote:
| 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
|
| That makes little sense. Buying mac mini would imply for the
| fused v-ram with the gpu capabilities, but then they're saying
| Claude/GPT-4 which don't have any gpu requirements.
|
| Is the author implying mac minis for the low power consumption?
| wesammikhail wrote:
| The author is full of shit is what it is. They see a few posts
| online and extrapolate from that to fit whatever narrative they
| believe in.
| daifi wrote:
| Claude/GPT-4 don't have any GPU requirements?
| keyle wrote:
| No dude, you send text or images and get the same back, it's
| all cloud.
| colecut wrote:
| I have seen dozens of people/videos talking about buying Mac
| minis for clawdbot.
|
| I don't understand why, but I've seen it enough to start
| questioning myself...
| MPSimmons wrote:
| The software can drive the web browser if you install the
| plugin. My knowledge is 1.5 weeks old, so it might be able to
| drive the whole UI now, I don't know.
| keyle wrote:
| Welcome to the AI meme race where everyone's knowledge is
| about 1.5 weeks old :)
| bronco21016 wrote:
| If you're heavily invested in Apple apps
| (iMessage/Calendar/Reminders/Notes), you need a Mac to give the
| agent tools to interact with these apps. I think that combined
| with the form factor, price, and power consumption, makes it an
| ideal candidate.
|
| If you're heavily invested in Windows, then you'd probably go
| for a small x86 PC.
| oidar wrote:
| Some of those connectors are only available on the mac and
| some only on the iPhone. Like notes is available on the mac,
| but not on the phone. Vice versa for reminders.
| keyle wrote:
| Can you imagine giving an AI access to your messages, notes
| and calendar though?
|
| I use agentic coding, this is next level madness.
| blacktulip wrote:
| I think (most of) them register new accounts for the agent.
| mangoman wrote:
| I guess what's wrong with it? Let's say it has read only
| access, new messages and calendar invites need approval.
| I'm not sure I understand the harm? I suppose data
| exfiltration, but like you could start with an allowlist
| approach. So the first few uses and reads take a while with
| allowing the ai to read stuff , but it doesn't seem that
| crazy given it's what we basically do with ai coding tools?
| bronco21016 wrote:
| I used Claude Code (CC) to make my own MCPs for these apps.
| I gave it read/write access only, no ability to delete. Of
| course it could probably code it's way into doing that
| since it can access the MCP code. I don't run it in --yolo
| mode though.
|
| I interact only with CC on the machine and watch what its
| doing, I haven't tried OpenClaw yet.
|
| Here's some workflows I've personally found valuable:
|
| - I have it read the "Grocery" Reminders list and find
| things I commonly buy every week and pre-populate the
| grocery list as a starting point. It only adds items that I
| haven't already added via Siri as the week goes on. For
| example, I might notice I've run out of cheese and I'll say
| "Hey Siri, add cheese to grocery list". The list is shared
| via iCloud Reminders app between my spouse and I.
|
| - Pre-CC, I wrote an OR-Tools python tool for "solving" the
| parenting time calendar. My ex and I work inconsistent
| schedules each month. Each month I was manually creating a
| calendar honoring requests, hard constraints, and
| attempting to balance custody 50/50. CC uses the MCPs to
| fetch the calendar events and review emails related to
| planning. It then structures everything as JSON as inputs
| to the optimizer. The optimizer runs with these inputs and
| spits out a few "solutions". I review the candidate
| solutions and select one. CC uses the MCP to add the
| solution to the calendar. This one saves me probably an
| hour every month.
|
| - CC uses an email MCP to fetch emails from my child's
| school and suggest events its found in the emails to add to
| the calendar.
|
| None of these are huge time savings on their own but the
| accumulation of reducing the time to complete these
| repetitive tasks has been awesome in my opinion. These are
| all things that most definitely would not have been worth
| automating with traditional dev work but since I can just
| dictate to CC for a few seconds and it has something that
| works a few minutes later it's become worthwhile.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Yep, there is zero reason to use mac mini's. It's way more cost
| effective to rent one (or more!) small VMs the cloud.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Wouldn't it run on a $50 raspberry pi?
|
| Probably the same people getting a macbook pro to handle their
| calendar and emails
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I thought I had heard that the integrated RAM/VRAM makes
| local LLMs fairly quick on a RAM-maxxed Mac Mini.
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| It has nothing to do with running models locally, its perfect
| because its incredibly cheap, capable, small, and quiet.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| It doesn't make sense because it's a lie. The author's blog has
| 2 articles, both of them shilling OpenClaw.
| zarp wrote:
| Spoiler: the author is an OpenClaw instance.
| dsrtslnd23 wrote:
| At least on clackernews.com they're upfront about it - it's
| a HN-style forum where only bots can post. No pretending to
| be human required.
| flexagoon wrote:
| Exactly. See also this sentence:
|
| > Look at who's about to get angry about OpenClaw-style
| automation: LinkedIn, Facebook, anyone with a walled garden
| and a careful API strategy.
|
| Browser automation tools have existed for a very long time.
| Openclaw is not much different in this regard than asking an
| LLM to generate you a playwright script. Yes, it makes it
| easier to automate arbitrary tasks, but it's not like it's
| some sort of breakthrough that completely destroys walled
| gardens.
| notatoad wrote:
| they're buying mac minis because it's the cheapest way to get a
| computer with iMessage access to stuff in a closet and leave on
| at all times. having access to your iMessage is one of the most
| interesting things openClaw does.
| fortran77 wrote:
| No no no. It's too risky, cutting-edge, and dangerous. While fun
| to play with, it's not something I'd trust my 92 year old mother
| with dementia (who still uses an iPad) with.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Apple has a lot of power over the developers on its platforms.
| As a thought experiment let's say they did launch it. It would
| put real skin in the game for getting security right. Who cares
| if a thousand people using openclaw. Millions of iOS users
| having such an assistant will spur a lot of investment towards
| safety.
| notatoad wrote:
| >It would put real skin in the game for getting security
| right.
|
| lol,no, you don't "put skin in the game for getting security
| right" by launching an obviously insecure thing. that's
| ridiculous. you get security right by actually doing
| something to address the security concerns.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It is impossible to address all of the concerns, and it is
| impossible to predict what concerns may even exist. It will
| require mass deployment to fully understand the
| implications of it.
| trehalose wrote:
| If we already know enough concerns to be certain mass
| deployment will be disastrous, is it worth it just to
| better understand the nature of the disaster, which
| doesn't have to happen in the first place?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Not having perfect security, does not mean it will be
| disastrous. My OpenClaw has been serving me just fine and
| I've been getting value out of it integrating and helping
| me with various tasks.
| small_scombrus wrote:
| [Insert survivorship bias aeroplane png here]
| sumeno wrote:
| Most drunk drivers make it home fine too
| abenga wrote:
| Implications are straightforward. You are giving
| unfettered access to your digital life to a software
| system that is vulnerable to the normal vulnerabilities
| plus social engineering vulnerabilities because it is
| attempting to use human language, and the way you prevent
| those is apparently writing sternly worded markdown files
| that we hope it won't ignore.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| are you that fucking dense?
|
| Allowing a stocastic dipshit to have unfettered access to
| your messages, photos location, passwords and payment
| info is not a good thing.
|
| We cannot protect against prompt attacks now, so why roll
| out something that will have complete control over all
| your private stuff when we know its horrifically
| insecure?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| HAHAHAAAAA
|
| you mean put millions of people's payment details up for a
| prompt injection attack?
|
| "Install this npm module" OK BOSS!
|
| "beep boop beep boop buy my dick pillz" [dodgy npm module
| activates] OK BOSS!
|
| "upload all your videos that are NSFW" [npm module continues
| to work] SURE THING BOSS!
|
| I am continued to be amazed that after 25 years of obvious
| and well documented fuckups in privacy, we just pile into the
| next fucking one without even batting an eyelid.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Meanwhile if you social engineer someone to run a piece of
| malware on macos. That malware can run npm install, steal
| your payment info and bitcoin keys, and upload any nsfw
| videos it finds to an attacker's server. That doesn't mean
| we should prevent people from installing software until the
| security situation is improved.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Right I'm going to assume you're naive rather than just
| instantly being contrarian.
|
| Yes of course someone could be socially engineered into
| downloading a malicious package, but that takes more
| effort, so whilst bad, is not an argument for _removing_
| all best security practices that have been rolled out to
| users in the last 5 years. what you are arguing for is a
| fundamentally unsafe OS that means no sensitive data can
| ever be safely stored there.
|
| You are arguing that a system that allows anyone to
| extract data if they send a reasonably well crafted
| prompt is just the same as someone willing installs a
| programme, goes into settings to turn off a safety
| function and bypasses at least two warning dialogues that
| are trying to stop them.
|
| if we translate this argument into say house building,
| your arguing that all railing and barriers to big drops
| are bad because people could just climb over them.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Truly sensitive files do not need to be shared with your
| AI agent. If you have an executive assistant you don't
| have to give them all of your personal information for
| them to be able to be useful.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Ok contrarian it is.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| It's just the juiciest attack surface of all time so I vehemently
| disagree.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| brisky wrote:
| Yes, it was vibe coded
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I heard the dev admitted he vibe coded the whole thing.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Wasn't he like one of the biggest claude token users in the
| world or something? (I could be misremembering)
| mmkos wrote:
| I don't have a stake and I'm not disagreeing, but care to say
| why?
| varenc wrote:
| 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.
| nielsbot wrote:
| I think this is exactly the holdup with Apple Intelligence. No
| rush to ship a Beta.
|
| (Ok, I suspect this is one of the main problems.. there may be
| others?)
| TheRoque wrote:
| 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.
| oxqbldpxo wrote:
| This! Def a game changer for apple.
| dcreater wrote:
| 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.
| nielsbot wrote:
| > No one is going to own an agentic layer
|
| Don't underestimate the capitalists. We've seen this many times
| in the past--most recently the commercialization of the
| Internet. Before that, phones, radio and television.
| dcreater wrote:
| Fair enough. This is my war time rhetoric. Its up to us to
| effect the future we want.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs
| up their asses for all these years.
|
| They've been wildly successful for all of those years. They've
| never been in the novel software business. Siri though one
| could argue was neglected, but it was also neglected at Amazon
| Alexa and Google home stuff still sucks too (mostly because
| none of them made any money and most of their big ideas for
| voice assistants never came true).
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| MacOS and NeXTstep / OSX were very much novel software for
| mass market consumers.
| acdha wrote:
| They haven't been truly novel if you want to say that, for
| example, the Lisa was covering Xerox PARC ideas but I think
| you'd have to ignore a lot of significant work to say they
| didn't substantially innovate in GUIs, personal assistants
| and handwriting recognition (Newton), touchscreen behavior
| (iPhone), etc.
|
| The key thing is that they tend not to ship things which
| aren't mature enough to be useful (Vision Pro and Apple
| Intelligence being cautionary tales about why) and voice
| assistants just aren't doing a whole lot for anyone. Google
| and Amazon have been struggling to find a market, too, and
| it's rare to find someone who uses those dramatically more
| than Apple users do Siri. I think most of the big advances
| need something close to AGI: if you can't describe something
| in a short command, it's usually much faster to use a device
| with a screen and a lot of the useful tasks need a level of
| security and reliability which requires actual reasoning to
| deliver.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| ...And it will be, now that Apple has partnered with OpenAI. The
| foundation of OpenClaw is capable models.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I used to have little cron jobs that would fire small python
| scripts daily to help me detect when certain clothes were on sale
| or in stock on a website it scraped and then send me an email or
| text. I was proud of that "automation".
|
| I guess now I'll just use an AI agent to do the same thing
| instantly :(
| razodactyl wrote:
| 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.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| >Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They're selling
| out everywhere
|
| Straight up bullshit.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Confirmed BS: https://resellcalendar.com/news/news/mac-mini-
| shortage-clawd...
| root_axis wrote:
| 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.
| luckydata wrote:
| I think openclaw is proving that the use case while promising is
| very much too early and nobody can ship a system like that that
| works the way a consumer expects it to work.
| lo_fye wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| No. Emphatically NOT. Apple has done a great job safeguarding
| people's devices and privacy from this crap. And no, AI slop and
| local automation is scarcely better than giving up your passwords
| to see pictures of cats, which is an old meme about the
| gullibility of the general public.
|
| OpenClaw is a symbol of everything that's wrong with AI, the same
| way that shitty memecoins with teams that rugpull you, or
| blockchain-adjacent centralized "give us your money and we pinky
| swear we are responsible" are a symbol of everything wrong with
| Web3.
|
| Giving everyone GPU compute power and open source models to use
| it is like giving everyone their own Wuhan Gain of Function Lab
| and hoping it'll be fine. Um, the probability of NO ONE
| developing bad things with AI goes to 0 as more people have it.
| Here's the problem: with distributed unstoppable compute, even
| ONE virus or bacterium escaping will be bad (as we've seen with
| the coronavirus for instance, smallpox or the black plague, etc.)
| And here we're talking about far more active and adaptable swarms
| of viruses that coordinate and can wreak havoc at unlimited
| scale.
|
| As long as countries operate on the principle of competition
| instead of cooperation, we will race towards disaster. The horse
| will have left the barn very shortly, as open source models
| running on dark compute will begin to power swarms of bots to be
| unstoppable advanced persistent threats (as I've been warning for
| years).
|
| Gain-of-function research on viruses is the closest thing I can
| think of that's as reckless. And at least there, the labs were
| super isolated and locked down. This is like giving everyone
| their own lab to make designer viruses, and hoping that we'll
| have thousands of vaccines out in time to prevent a worldwide
| catastrophe from thousands of global persistent viruses. We're
| simply headed towards a nearly 100% likely disaster if we don't
| stop this.
|
| If I had my way, AI would only run in locked-down environments
| and we'd just use inert artifacts it produces. This is good
| enough for just about all the innovations we need, including for
| medical breakthroughs and much more. We know where the compute
| is. We can see it from space. Lawmakers still have a brief window
| to keep it that way before the genie cannot be put back into the
| bottle.
|
| A decade ago, I really thought AI would be responsible developed
| like this: https://nautil.us/the-last-invention-of-man-236814/ I
| still remember the quaint time when OpenAI and other companies
| promised they'd vet models really strongly before releasing them
| or letting them use the internet. That was... 2 years ago. It was
| considered an existential risk. No one is talking about that now.
| MCP just recently was the new hotness.
|
| I wasn't going to get too involved with building AI platforms but
| I'm diving in and a month from now I will release an alternative
| to OpenClaw that actually shows the way how things are supposed
| to go. It involves completely locked-down environments, with
| reproducible TEE bases and hashes of all models, and even
| deterministic AI so we can _prove_ to each other the provenance
| of each output all the way down to the history of the prompts and
| input images. I 've already filed two provisional patents on both
| of these and I'm going to implement it myself (not an NPE). But
| even if it does everything as well as OpenClaw and even better
| and 100% safely, some people will still want to run local models
| on general purpose computing environments. The only way to
| contain the runaway explosion now is to come together the same
| way countries have come together to ban chemical weapons, CFCs
| (in the Montreal protocol), let the hole in the ozone layer heal,
| etc. It is still possible...
|
| This is how I feel:
|
| https://www.instagram.com/reels/DIUCiGOTZ8J/
|
| _PS: Historically, for the last 15 years, I 've been a huge
| proponent of open source and an opponent of patents. When it
| comes to existential threats of proliferation, though, I am
| willing to make an exception on both._
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| - I give openclaw another 3 months before it fades into obscurity
| chefsweaty wrote:
| And when it does, there will be another thing just like it
| getting the hype
| kempje wrote:
| This reads like it was written by an LLM.
| epaga wrote:
| "Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons."
| (and writes blog posts)
| tzury wrote:
| 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.
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| > is kind of entitlement blogging that I have nearly zero
| respect for.
|
| Maybe the author left out something very real. Apple is a
| walled-garden monopoly with a locked-down ecosystem and even
| devices. They are also not alone in this. As far as innovation
| goes, these companies stifle innovation. Demanding more from
| these companies is not entitlement.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
|
| I do not like reading things like this. It makes me feel very
| disconnected from the AI community. I defensively do not believe
| there exist people who would let AI do their taxes.
| xngbuilds wrote:
| 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.
| tgma wrote:
| 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.
| anon_anon12 wrote:
| 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.
| chefsweaty wrote:
| 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?
| ordersofmag wrote:
| Price. For a given CPU and RAM the mini is cheaper. Why pay
| more for portability you aren't going to use.
| chefsweaty wrote:
| True. I had assumed that mini prices had gone higher than
| they're at right now.
| joeyguerra wrote:
| 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.
| marstall wrote:
| holy crap, that's amazing. i struggle to get my head around the
| agent hype - but i guess this video helps a little. I have
| Agent FOMO, I guess.
| binsquare wrote:
| Genuinely just tried this and thought, this is what Siri / Alexa
| should be
| f311a wrote:
| 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
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| 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.
| kaycey2022 wrote:
| 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
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| sen wrote:
| 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.
| dsrtslnd23 wrote:
| Already happening. Check out clackernews.com -- it's a HN-style
| forum exclusively for AI agents. They register via API, post
| stories, comment, vote. No human login. The bots already have
| their own community.
| alexruf wrote:
| Yes, and I am glad OpenClaw built it first, so Apple doesn't do
| such a terrible mistake.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| pretty strong disagree; Apple can't afford to potentially start
| an AI apocalypse because it tried to launch an OpenClaw type
| service without making it impossible for prompt-injection or
| agent identity hijacking to happen as we're seeing with Moltbook
|
| Let OpenClaw experiment and beta test with the hackers who won't
| mind if things go sideways (risk of creating Skynet aside), and
| once we've collectively figured out how to create such a system
| that can act powerfully on behalf of its users but with solid
| guardrails, then Apple can implement it.
| zombot wrote:
| The author must have drunk unhealthy amounts of koolaid.
| 8eye wrote:
| 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
| rock_artist wrote:
| 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.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Large models running in huge data centers are profitable, so
| quite sustainable.
|
| Yes, they are a mixed bag, but still useful.
|
| And if on-device models get to the point where they're not a
| "mixed bag" and are genuinely useful, won't larger data center
| models be even more so?
| zkmon wrote:
| 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.
| khalic wrote:
| Oh yeah nothing like all my data being sent to a third party and
| access to all my apps. JFC people...
| zkmon wrote:
| So far, personal assistants have only been an initial wonder that
| faded away. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Home etc hardly had any
| big impact. It's not fault of the company or product. Usecase is
| not strong and not worth the hassle and privacy. It's not a basic
| need yet.
| RobMurray wrote:
| That's because all of those products are laughably bad compared
| to chat gpt or similar, and they are still bad despite the
| advances in AI. Apple integrated Siri with Chat GPT and some
| how managed to make it so much worse. It can't even do a
| conversation and the speech recognition is near useless and
| hasn't improved in 10 years. Alexa is the same except I feel
| like it used to hear me better. Now I have to shout.
| epaga wrote:
| "Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons."
|
| ...and that writes blog posts for you. So tired of this voice.
| nlpnerd wrote:
| That is an idealistic take without business sense. Startups (and
| individual hackers in this case) exists to take this kind of
| radical bets because the risk/reward profile is asymmetrically in
| their favour. Whereas for an enterprise, the risk/reward is
| inverse.
|
| If Peter Steinberger is able to generate even a 100M this year
| from Clawdbot what he has is a multi billion dollar business that
| would be life-changing even for a successful entrepreneur like
| him who is already a multi-millionaire. If it collapses from the
| security flaws, and other potential safety issues he loses
| nothing, starting from zero and going back to it. Peter
| Steinberger (and startups in general) have a lot to gain and very
| little or close to nothing to lose.
|
| The iPhone generated 400B in revenue for Apple in 2025. Clawdbot
| even if it contributes 4B in revenue this very year would not
| move the needle much for Apple. On the contrary, if Apple rushes
| and botches releasing something like this they might just
| collapse this 400B/annum income stream. Apple and other large
| enterprises (and their execs) have a lot to lose and very little
| to gain from rushing into something like this.
| orangethief wrote:
| > Maybe they just didn't see it.
|
| They sell it as a concept with every single one of their
| showcases. They saw it.
|
| > Or maybe they saw it and decided the risk wasn't worth it.
|
| They sell it as a concept with every single one of their
| showcases. They wanted to actually be selling it.
|
| The reason is simple.
|
| They failed, like all others. They couldn't sandbox it. They
| could have done a ghetto form of internal MCP where the AI can
| ONLY access emails. Or ONLY access pages in a browser when a user
| presses a button. And so on. But every time they tried, they
| never managed to sandbox it, and the agent would come out of the
| gates. Like everyone else did.
|
| Including OpenClaw.
|
| But Apple has a reputation. OpenClaw is an hyped up shitposter.
| OpenClaw will trailblaze and make the cool thing until it stops
| causing horrible failures. They will have the molts escape the
| buckets and ruin the computer of the tech savvy early adopters,
| until that fateful day when the bucket is sealed.
|
| Then Apple will steal that bucket.
|
| They always do.
|
| I'm not a 40 year old whippersnapper anymore. My options were
| never those two.
| chaosprint wrote:
| I completely disagree. 1. OpenClaw's design is ugly. 2. Its
| security is extremely worrying. 3. I hate this kind of marketing.
|
| Personal opinion.
| matt3210 wrote:
| > Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes
|
| No sane person would let an AI agent file their taxes
| wooger wrote:
| This is the most obviously AI written text I think I've ever
| read.
| architsingh15 wrote:
| Such a fresh read
| wtcactus wrote:
| I keep seeing posts about OpenClaw (I still didn't try it myself)
| but I don't get the constant references to the Mac Minis.
|
| Why are people needing the Mac Minis? Isn't OpenClaw supposed to
| run locally in your laptop?
|
| And if it actually should run as a service, why a MacMini and not
| some docker on the local NAS for instance?
| 47282847 wrote:
| You need to run it on MacOS if you want it to interact with
| iMessages and such. And people are likely not proficient enough
| to set up and connect everything without GUI.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Oh, so, it's just a way to have it parse iMessages when the
| laptop is off, basically? (I'm trying to think of special mac
| only services that the AI bot will check, but I can only come
| up with iMessages).
| baby wrote:
| Man this is rough, I spend a year with a folding phone on android
| and the AI integration was amazing. Just switched back to iOS and
| it's just sad.
| amelius wrote:
| Apple owns a platform. So they can just implement this later and
| make sure the competition loses their edge.
| mold_aid wrote:
| What are the actual numbers on these purpotedly all-encompassing
| mac mini sales?
| andix wrote:
| The main issue why we don't see AI agents in products: PROMPT
| INJECTIONS
|
| Even with the most advanced LLMs and even sandboxing there is
| always the risk of prompt injections and data extraction.
|
| Even if the AI can't directly upload data to the internet, or
| delete local data, there are always some ways to leak data. For
| example by crafting an email with the relevant text in white or
| invisible somewhere. The user clicks "ok send" from what they
| see, but still some data is leaked.
|
| Apple intelligence is based on a local model on the device, which
| is much more susceptible for prompt injections.
| bertili wrote:
| Surely this is the elephant in the room, but the point here is
| that Apple as control over its ecosystem, so it may be able to
| sandbox and make entitlements and transparency good enough, in
| the apps that the bot can access.
| andix wrote:
| Like I said: sandboxing doesn't solve the problem.
|
| As long as the agent creates more than just text, it can leak
| data. If it can access the internet in any manner, it can
| leak data.
|
| The models are extremely creative and good at figuring out
| stuff, even circumventing safety measures that are not fully
| air tight. Most of the time they catch the deception, but in
| some very well crafted exploits they don't.
| meindnoch wrote:
| No, thank you.
| chadash wrote:
| The problem is that OpenClaw is kind of like a self driving car
| that works 90% of the time. As we have seen, that last 10% (and
| billions of dollars) is the difference between Waymo today and
| prototypes 10 years ago.
|
| Being Apple is just a structural disadvantage. Everyone knows
| that open claw is not secure, and it's not like I blame the solo
| developer. He is just trying to get a new tool to market. But
| imagine that this got deployed by Apple and now all of your
| friends, parents and grandparents have it and implicitly trust it
| because Apple released it. Having it occasionally drain some bank
| accounts isn't going to cut it.
|
| This is not to say Apple isn't behind. But OpenClaw is doing
| stuff that even the AI labs aren't comfortable touching yet.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| They have all the time in the world, practically. OpenClaw is
| nowhere near an Apple product for myriad reasons. When Apple is
| able to build an agent that is safe and reliable, they will.
| brutus1979 wrote:
| Newbie question .. how much ram do u need for tbis on mac minis?
| I thought u had soldered ram these days. So arent people limited
| by that?
| apetresc wrote:
| It depends on whether you're running the models locally. If
| you're just using a Claude or OpenAI token (as probably 95%+ of
| OpenClaw users are), the RAM requirements are minimal. My
| first-gen M1 Mac Mini runs it just fine.
| ghc wrote:
| Apple can't hand wave away prompt injection attacks. They would
| be absolute fools to deploy the technology as it exists now at
| their scale.
| jordiburgos wrote:
| How OpenClaw got so much promoted in days? Maybe Apple is behind
| them and wants everybody to beta test it before they sell it as a
| service.
|
| So all the current users or OpenClaw are just beta-testers.
| yoda97 wrote:
| This post reads like an apple fanfiction
| a_ba wrote:
| Can someone enlighten me what people actually use this for? The
| article mentions ,,managing your calendar, responding to emails,
| file your taxes"
|
| The bottleneck for emails and my calendar is not the speed at
| which I can type/click some buttons, but rather figuring out what
| I want to write or clarifying priorities when managing my
| calendar.
| Panda4 wrote:
| I'm also curious.
|
| So far the only purpose I have seen for this is people selling
| the hype; people posting videos/courses on how to use it.
|
| I have downloaded and tried it and I can't figure out why would
| I need it.
| eole666 wrote:
| People actually use this kind of software today ? When I read
| OpenClaw description : "The AI that actually does things. Clears
| your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in
| for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you
| already use.". It does not appeal to me at all. I wouldn't trust
| an IA agent near my mails, calendars, messages, flights or
| anything it could mess-up with. It sounds like a security
| nightmare waiting to happen.
| Havoc wrote:
| A security and privacy disaster?
| amelius wrote:
| Can't wait to buy a new ClawBook.
| randusername wrote:
| I haven't seen mention of macOS Automator or AppleScript yet.
|
| 15 years ago or so almost everything you wanted to do on a Mac
| GUI already _was_ scriptable.
|
| Shortcuts is better than nothing, but unsatisfying.
|
| I read this less as a fumble and more as a frustrating sign of
| the times. Automation is not powerful because powerful automation
| is a maintenance and malfeasance liability only valued by a tiny
| minority.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Shortcuts on the desktop can run shell commands or Applescript.
| You can send a limited number of things to Apple Intelligence
| in it already too. I still rarely use it. There's probably good
| things I could codify (like search all my Mail and Calendar
| events for a given string), but the reality is most stuff I
| don't do on a regular basis, and a natural language request to
| go do something would be a lot easier.
| nphardon wrote:
| What are people doing with OpenClaw? Seems like some bleeding
| edge stuff will come out of this sort of experimentation.
| soorya3 wrote:
| You just put words in Apple's mouth. This is exactly what they
| should do but safer . This is entirely possible because only
| apple has control on their ecosystem.
|
| If they optimize their entire hardware line (iPhone, Watch, Mac
| Mini, Macbook) AI enhanced with local/remote LLM model, they will
| win big. Imagine someone running a business can manage their
| entire business with iPhone/Mac/iCloud without buying any other
| saas services (inventory, payments, customer service).
| esseph wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/SkCa27Xxcr
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/HN0aaOLBzT
| fufubarzz wrote:
| openclaw-is-what-apple-intelligence-should-have-been
|
| Title is tech aspirational annd economic foolish: makes no sense
| whatsoever.
|
| Who benefits from openclaw? Apple that's who!
|
| Who care that they "invented it" it free open software that
| drives hw sales.
|
| We're done here.
| TruePath wrote:
| Whoever wrote this just doesn't understand who apple's main
| customers really are. Yes, devs may be a high impact customer
| base but most of apple's customers are people like my mom who
| struggles with the difference between Gmail the app, Gmail the
| web page and Gmail in apple mail and is reasonably worried about
| scams and viruses because she knows she isn't really tech savvy
| enough to spot them. If she is going to run AI on her apple
| products it can't be 'well it probably won't delete your data.'.
| It needs to be something she can be sure is safe and is limited
| to the access she gives it.
|
| That's a really tough problem. I'm not even sure yet google can
| pull it off.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-05 23:01 UTC)