when you say "audio interface" I assume you mean like, "Hey Siri" and not an audio interface as in recording device, right?

So we are talking about a HomePod with a screen, or like one of those Meta "Portal" things?

Not sure. Some AI audio pendants are always on. The Apple device is rumored to adapt its interface to the user based on facial recognition. They could choose to start monitoring audio when it thinks a known human wants to interact with the device, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145201

  Apple is developing a tabletop robot as the centerpiece of its artificial intelligence strategy, with plans to launch the device in 2027.. The robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel to follow users around a room..The company is also exploring other robotics concepts, including a mobile bot with wheels similar to Amazon’s Astro, and has discussed humanoid models..

> Some AI audio pendants are always on. The Apple device is rumored to adapt its interface to the user based on facial recognition.

Hmmm, so they traded always-on audio recording for always-on video recording. Not sure this is an improvement.

FaceID (3D) facial recognition would not need video recording.

While true, I think the parent meant more that the camera would be active constantly, instead of a mic.

The FaceID subsystem is already pulsing periodically (N seconds?) on iPhones, e.g. to check for human attention. Apple could also use WiFi 7 Sensing (which can fingerprint humans by heartbeat) to trigger on human presence and determine when a full facial recognition scan was needed.

Jeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..

The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level, they still have margin in there even at market prices, and they are notorious for supply chain management and locking in contracts/prices ahead of time. So doubt Apple will change anything here short term.

On the flip side if you're buying a new computer in 2026 - it's going to be even harder to justify not getting a MacBook, the chips are already 2 years ahead of PC, the price of base models was super competitive, now that the ram is super expensive even the upgraded versions are competitive with the PC market. Oh and Windows is turning to an even larger pile of shit on a daily basis.

Yeah, but the Linux support is still quite poor unfortunately.

I'd buy a mac in a sec otherwise.

Yes, that’s the reason I am holding back too.

If Apple fully supported the Asahi Linux project, I 'll switch in a heartbeat.

Apple is releasing new devices next week, I wonder if they will take the opportunity to increase memory prices.

The mac chips are ahead in single threaded performance and maybe performance per watt but thats about it. Factoring cost they're competing against the top x86 chips which out preform them in nearly every workload while remaining upgradable and stable.

> The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level

Probably not quite, but I was pricing a Lenovo laptop last week and this is the first time the lenovo price for RAM upgrades was lower than 3rd party RAM.

2 years ahead?

My canonical example is I bought 12 sticks of 64GB DDR4LRDIMM for 400-430$. Now each stick costs 320$... Just a year ago...

That's insane! I think SSD prices have also skyrocketed but to a lesser extent

Yes, ssds also rose, but much less so. IIUC, definitely didn't double.

Apple also uses a different kind of RAM (iirc a custom LPDDR5X to use with their Unified Memory SOC - not the same kind as the commodity RAM that everyone is putting in their PCs. So they aren’t competing with everyone on it. Plus they probably locked in their rates back in 2024 with their suppliers.

The packaging might be different, but they're still competing for the same fab capacity.

such a good tune

why were mac minis so popular for this compared to any other machine, cloud VPS or local VM?

Macs have "unified memory" meaning the GPU uses the same memory as the CPU and minis can have up to 64 gigs. So its a lot faster than running on a CPU and a lot cheaper than any other GPU based rig with similar memory.

Most openclaw users are not running the models locally.

This is what I thought. The iMessage integration makes sense I guess though.

Everyone recommending a Mac Mini for OpenClaw is recommending the base model (which has just 16GB of ram), so it’s not about the unified memory, it is about the agent being able to interact with your apple ecosystem services like reminders, iMessage etc.

It is the cheapest Mac you can get for that.

It allows your Claw to access all your iCloud data easily like reminders and iMessage for example

Everything about that makes me feel very uncomfortable. Google made and spent a fortune on getting people's data, and now people are just handing it out for free by the GBs.

Mac’s are still pretty terrible at running LLMs. They will be there someday, but that isn’t today

Because these people have Apple IDs, and they need a machine that can access their various accounts.

The Mac mini has a very good value for money if you need raw performance in a small silent package. Frequently available for between $399 - $499 discounted.

A VPS that can perform like a Mac mini will likely cost the same as a Mac mini in 12 months time.

Openclaw is running via api. The reason people are bying separate machines is for security isolation and 24/7 power — performance is irrelevant.

I picked one up to replace my prior mini that I spent 4x the amount of money on. It's an absolute speed demon.

so you can use the full operating system

More importantly iMessage

And get hacked via prompt injection

That’s why people buy separate machines / use VPS.

In classic Apple fashion, they fooled people into thinking an integrated GPU is the same as Nvidia.

Gosh I wish I could hire their marketing company.

Where did they say this?

The market is spooked by capex projections generally. Interesting that Microsoft, despite some apparent hesitation in 2025, seems to be still going all in on AI spend over the next several years according to the most recent earnings call.

MS, GOOG bonds being sold to fund capex still put them green $/employee, they will survive of not thrive.

OpenAI...not so sure, they need an IPO soon while public still is high off the double bull run post 2020

I listed to this audiobook several years ago, and while it intrigued me to an extent, I had a hard time getting past the fact that the guy (who is an American white guy), calls himself "Culadasa".

I also found it troubling to try to take spiritual advice, no matter how practical, from someone who had been married and divorced multiple times.

More recently, he's been accused of inappropriate behaviors and was blackballed from some of the spiritual/meditation organizations he was a part of.

Perhaps it's my evangelical upbringing that has made me hardened and highly suspect of anyone trying to lead people in a spiritual way, but unfortunately I feel like I just keep getting proven right over and over again.

Man, just do the practices.

There is no ethical teaching from a high pedestal in this book. This book teaches a practical meditation technique.

Practice it enough, you will start seeing minor benefits.

He never was a "spiritual leader". He was a med school professor. He had been ordained as a _upāsaka_, a lay Buddhist disciple, meaning he took the vow of following the five precepts and he was given this name by the people who ordained him, that's not a weird thing. He later was removed from the board of the meditation center he co-founded because he broke the precepts (adultery and lying about it to his wife, hardly a criminal)[1], so he was prohibited from teaching things. He died recently from cancer[2].

His approach in the book, which seems still taught at that center, probably because it's excellent, was to lay out a path for meditation practice that was inspired from classic Buddhist writings, but presented and explained with modern neuroscience.

Getting advice from a divorced guy doesn't look great, but thankfully there are many more role models to look up to, and (early) Buddhism requires very little faith and demands that you verify the teachings by yourself anyway.

[1] https://engagedharma.net/2019/08/19/culadasa-charged-with-se... [2] https://culadasa.com/

To be clear I'm not saying being divorced is a failing. But he has now been married 3 times, and has admitted to having extramarital affairs with prostitutes, as well as "supporting" them financially.

C# is a great language, and .NET is a really good runtime that is cross-platform.

I would personally chose it over Java, and I think it is more "batteries included" than Go.

If you need to write a business/web application that is fairly easy to maintain and has good performance, yes I would pick C#.

Also, while functional programming etc is possible in C#, all the code I've seen has been very Object-Oriented. Classes for days. Dependency injection, factories, and other "Design Patterns" aplently.

Obviously with Python or Node.js you'll likely have an easier time getting off the ground but the performance will be worse (if that matters)

source: SWE manager at MSFT, mostly C# stuff. 10+ YOE with other languages prior to joining

Sounds like Microsoft too.

I realize this does nothing to solve your problem, but for the sake of discusion, internally at Microsoft, pretty much all the developers I know have switched to using "Devbox", which means we use a remote desktop client to access our dev machine.

A lot of us resisted this at first, but then just kindof came to accept it, and it made it so we have a lot more capable machines to do development on than the laptops that we would have to recycle every couple years.

I know there have probably been a lot of "thin client" products/services in the education space in the past, but I think it might be time to try again.

Like another poster here, I think it's "sad" that kids are using laptops. Laptops have small screens and poor ergonomics.

A thin client setup with a good keyboard, mouse and monitor could be better and more affordable / future proof.

Chromebooks are thin clients of sorts, its a web browser rendering google docs locally.

If anything is making them slow its the javascript bloat of modern webapps that could be doing more serverside.

>Laptops have small screens and poor ergonomics.

This is a huge gripe of me and my wife. Growing up we all had desktops in the computer lab at school (elementary+) and you had decent size screens. Now kids pull up their little 12" chromebook in their classroom. Kids have eye strains, myopia etc...

We used G3 iMacs with the puck mouse until high school. You can't convince me it was the epitome of ergonomics.

They were an upgrade from the Mac LC II. I don't recall those having very big screens either.

15" and 4:3 was about as big as it got in high school. A computer on a table and we sat on a normal plastic school chair.

And the flicker. It was pretty bad on most screens.

Of course they switched to devbox which is nothing more than azure virtual desktop with some added bells and whistles... also has the nice side effect that it's a subscription. Nice for microsoft at least, less for the consumer.

You don’t have to recycle laptops every few years. That’s a sandy foundation to build the rest of that “came to accept it” on. You weren’t just made to do it and retconned justification for compliance?

> internally at Microsoft, pretty much all the developers I know have switched to using "Devbox", which means we use a remote desktop client to access our dev machine.

Everything old is new again, back to the days of using a single shared server for software development in timesharing setup.

Instead of Novell Netware, UNIX, VMS, AS/400,..., it is the cloud.

The "cloud" is most likely running Linux so it's UNIX-like. Everything old is new again!!

Devbox seems to be semi-public, and/or offered to customers: https://devbox.microsoft.com/

Curious if there's a way random people can test it.

This is basically the same as having an automated way to provision Azure VM instances that you would access via RDP, already quite common in many IT organisations, especially for temporary team members as contractors.

I wonder if Michael Bury's puts printed. The stock is down about 30% from when I think he announced them.