Clawdbot, which made the Mac mini sell out overnight, is what Apple's AI Siri sees itself as.

Overnight, the Mac mini orders skyrocketed, leaving Apple's sales department a bit bewildered.

There was no product launch event, and the Spring Festival price cuts seemed only to be significant for the iPhone Air. However, the discussion about the Mac mini suddenly and eerily soared on major social platforms. If you open X or Reddit, you'll find screenshots of Mac mini orders and all kinds of meme pictures everywhere.

Even Logan Kilpatrick, the head of Google AI Studio, posted on X, saying, "I've placed an order for a Mac mini."

But could you imagine that what made netizens reach for their wallets was just an open - source project called Clawdbot that suddenly went viral on GitHub? This is a self - deployed AI assistant project. Just because online guides all say that using a Mac mini to set it up is the best choice, the Mac mini became popular like this.

It has to be said that at the beginning of this year, the explosion of various AI products is unprecedented. Previously, Claude Cowork attracted 48 million views, which in turn led to the popularity of Skills and Claude Code. The feeds on X are all tutorials about them.

Now comes Clawdbot, which claims to be a real AI personal assistant that can run on your own device. And the number of stars on GitHub has suddenly skyrocketed from 5,000 to 20,000 in the past few days, which is quite rare among open - source projects.

Some netizens posted meme pictures saying that their 2026 has just begun, and they've already been "possessed" by these things. When will such days end?

Just when you've learned to use Claude Code, they say OpenAI's Codex is better. After using Cowork, there's Skills. And there's also the unexpected Mac mini | Image source: x@riomadeit

However, there's no need to be anxious about these AI tools. APPSO is here to help you figure out what Clawdbot is, why it has attracted everyone's attention, and what's going on with the Mac mini.

Hope this is you after reading | Image source: x@OanaGoge

Clawdbot is a mobile - version Cowork

Siri has been touted as a smart assistant for so many years, but for most users, it's still just for setting alarms. What Clawdbot aims to do is to achieve "what Siri should have been."

Clawdbot official website: https://clawd.bot/

To be an ideal "Siri", Clawdbot, to some extent, replicates Cowork's model and integrates more local mobile content.

Specifically, Clawdbot is a self - deployed AI assistant with the concept of message - first. We don't need to download a new client. Clawdbot is just an avatar in the chat list. You can send messages to it just like sending WeChat messages to colleagues, and it will reply in the same chat window.

Does this sound like an early "chatbot"? Deploying such a bot on Telegram is nothing new. Even when ChatGPT first came out, some people deployed similar AI assistants on WeChat.

However, the difference of Clawdbot lies in the concept of "Gateway".

An ordinary chatbot is just a mouthpiece for the model, while Clawdbot is a central hub (Gateway). It connects common chat apps (WhatsApp/Telegram/iMessage, etc.) on one side and the most powerful AI brains (we can freely switch between Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, MiniMax, or local models) on the other side. In the middle, it is connected to numerous intelligent agent tools with different Skills.

Image source: https://youtu.be/SaWSPZoPX34

As described in this architecture diagram, with previous chatbots, we could only have a few conversations or generate a few pictures. However, Clawdbot's architecture consists of a Gateway, an Agent, Memory, and Skills.

We can deploy a Clawdbot in different chat tools. A common configuration is to use Telegram. This is also the interface in the User section of the above diagram where we interact with Clawdbot.

Then, Clawdbot uses the gateway to connect different chat apps and AI robots. For example, the project mentions that it can support sending and receiving messages on iMessage, using an open - source project on GitHub, steipete/imsg, which provides a command - line interface (CLI) on macOS to "list/read/monitor/send" messages in Messages.app (iMessage/SMS).

Image source: https://docs.clawd.bot/channels/whatsapp

For other instant messaging tools, Clawdbot also uses standard interfaces such as official APIs or simulating web - versions to obtain information received by chat apps. In their official documentation, detailed settings for connecting to different chat apps are provided.

This information will be further processed by large AI language models. That is the Agent part in the diagram, which is also Clawdbot's brain. We can set the APIs of different large language models and use different models such as Claude and ChatGPT for processing. The Agent is also connected to a rich set of Skills to enhance the capabilities of the intelligent agent.

Skills have also been very popular recently. Clawdbot provides common skills such as web browsing, connecting to calendars and email, searching X posts, connecting to Excel, and setting lists in the mobile memo.

Clawdbot's official Skills library: https://clawdhub.com/skills

It's worth mentioning that in Clawdbot's brain, the thinking and memory parts are separated. Thinking is supported by third - party AI models, but the memory doesn't disappear when the large model is changed. The memory is stored entirely on the platform where Clawdbot is deployed, either locally or on a cloud service provider. Therefore, generally speaking, Clawdbot's memory capacity is unlimited.

This architecture also gives Clawdbot some capabilities that other Agents don't have.

1. It has a memory. If we told it last week that "I only drink oat milk lattes", when we ask it to order coffee next week, it won't ask us what kind of milk we want again. Because it has persistent memory. Conversations are no longer one - time throwaways but have continuous context, just like chatting with friends. Moreover, this context won't be forgotten just because we chat with another friend.

2. Initiative, which is the most human - like feature. Current AIs are all passive. If we don't ask, they'll never speak. Clawdbot supports initiative. We can set it to send us a summary of unread emails at 8 am every morning or send a pop - up window as soon as it detects a server outage. It has changed from "humans looking for AI" to "AI looking for humans", which is a qualitative change.

3. It really gets things done. Through rich tool connections and the introduction of Skills, it's no longer just for chatting. Connected to Notion, it can help us organize notes; connected to the calendar, it can arrange meetings; connected to the browser, it can collect information online and summarize it into documents.

Imagine, at 4:55 pm on Friday, your phone vibrates. It's not your boss nagging, but a message from Clawdbot: "Here is a summary of the 5 main tasks you completed this week, and a reminder for the meeting at 10 am next Monday. Do you need me to organize them into a weekly report and send it to the team?"

Obviously, this is the "assistant" we want, not just a search box that can only write poems and draw pictures. Some netizens on X have used Clawdbot for stock trading, shopping, doing business, and Vibe Coding is also no problem.

After a netizen deployed Clawdbot using Claude Opus 4.5, he directly gave it a trading wallet of $2000, asking it to conduct market research every 4 hours using multiple APIs, continuously propose new trading ideas, and then re - evaluate open positions.

Although we don't know if Clawdbot can earn enough money for itself to buy an RTX 4090, such cross - platform scenarios where we can really let AI take over are indeed increasing.

Some netizens also used it to buy a car and saved $4200. How did it work? Basically, Clawdbot took on all the work.

It first used tools like Browser Use to browse preferential policies and loan interest rates on the web. After helping the blogger find a suitable car model, it continued to contact suppliers through Clawdbot and negotiated the price with dealers. Back and forth, Clawdbot really managed to get a good deal.

It can not only help us save money by negotiating prices when buying things. Some people even deployed it to run a tea company. Truly, one Mac mini can be a company.

There's also Vibe coding, where it can directly create a game interface.

For more usage scenarios, you can check the official case showcase at https://clawd.bot/showcase

Don't be deceived by the Mac mini hype online

As Clawdbot became popular, there are photos everywhere on X showing several Mac minis stacked on the desktop with captions like "Building my private AI computing power center".