No, OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) does not require a Mac Mini, and it is not tied to any specific Apple hardware. This misconception usually comes from early demos or community setups where developers used Mac Minis as convenient, always-on home servers. While a Mac Mini can be a good fit for that role, OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) is designed to be platform-agnostic and can run on any system that meets its basic runtime requirements.
In practical terms, OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) runs on common operating systems and hardware configurations. Developers run it on laptops for development, on desktops for personal automation, on small single-board computers for lightweight tasks, and on cloud servers for 24/7 availability. The choice of hardware affects performance and reliability, but not compatibility. If you plan to run local AI models, you may want hardware with sufficient CPU or GPU resources, but that applies equally to Macs, PCs, and servers. If you use hosted model APIs, hardware requirements drop significantly, because the local machine mainly handles orchestration and messaging.
Many production-like deployments use inexpensive Linux servers or VPS instances, precisely because OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) does not depend on proprietary hardware. This flexibility also applies to storage and memory design. Long-term context and embeddings are often stored in a vector database such as Milvus or managed Zilliz Cloud, which further decouples the agent from the machine it runs on. With that setup, you can migrate OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) between machines—or replace hardware entirely—without losing memory or state. The takeaway is simple: a Mac Mini is one option, not a requirement, and OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) is intentionally built to run wherever developers are comfortable deploying services.