the VPS. I feel like these are the two most popular ways people are setting up their Clawbots. That's how I set up mine was with the Mac Mini. But, I feel like most people are saying, "Hey, you're wasting your money. Go with the VPS. " Well, here are the strengths and weaknesses of those two. So, right off the rip, Mac Mini, it's starting at $600. I don't think you need an expensive Mac Mini. The ones that are more than $600. I think you can get away with a base one, but $600 is still a lot for a lot of people. On the VPS side, this is the virtual private server side. This is like the Amazon EC2s and other virtual private servers. They are cheap. You can get away with using this for free on Amazon EC2. I even had a video about setting it up on the Amazon EC2. I'll link to that down below. But you can get away with using that for free. From a cost perspective, the VPS might be the strongest out of all of them. But here's where the strengths of the Mac Mini come in and the weaknesses of the VPS. The Mac Mini is secure by default. By default, when you set up Claudebot on a Mac Mini, it has access to nothing. It can't leak anything because it's not connected to anything. It's not public facing. So, by default, the Mac Mini is extremely secure. By default, the VPS is not secure. In fact, it is the least secure of all these ones that we have up here. Now, by default, there is no security set up with a VPS. When you put this on Amazon EC2, that server instance is public to the entire internet. Meaning, if you set up your Clogbot in there, people can access your keys. That is not good. That means people can steal your keys and use all your services and charge you thousands of dollars. In order to secure a VPS, you need to do a whole bunch of technical things. You need to install SSH and firewalls and a whole bunch of other things. For the average person, that is too complex. and I wouldn't recommend doing it. On top of that, the VPS is extremely hard to interact with. It's just a CLI in your browser. For most people, they don't want to sit there and their way of engaging with an AI agent just talking to a CLI. On top of that, it doesn't integrate, right? So, if you want to send it a photo or an image or a video, it's going to be extremely difficult to do. As for the Mac Mini, it's extremely easy to interact with. I would argue that Mac OS is the most userfriendly operating system of them all. It takes seconds to get into and there's a reason why it's the most popular OS. It's also fully integrated. So if you have other Apple devices like I have an iPhone for instance, I have an iPad, I have a MacBook Pro. Anytime I want to give my 247 AI employee agent a file, whether it's a photo or a video or anything, all I have to do is click a button and I can airdrop that file to my Mac Mini that has my Clawbot on it. So for instance, if I want to make the thumbnail for this video, all I need to do is airdrop the video to my Claudebot. say, "Hey, check out the video. Look at the transcript and create me a thumbnail. " It and it can go and do that. So, it is fully integrated into my entire workflow, which is really amazing and like honestly like 90% of the value. Anyway, on top of that, you can use all the modern AI tools with it. So, one of the strengths of the Claudebot is it is a basically a human employee. It can do anything a human being can do. All these AI companies, the tools they come out with, they drop on Apple first. They come out on Apple products first. So your Clawbot can leverage all those powerful AI tools that drop like the new codecs that just dropped for instance. It's only on Apple. So by getting a Mac Mini, you're going to have all the modern tools. I believe by going with a VPS like Amazon EC2, you are absolutely destroying your experience with Cloudbot just so that you can save a couple dollars. You're putting a really insecure instance of Claudebot on the internet that people can hack. you're having a really unpleasant experience using Claudebot, which I feel like 90% of this is like just having fun and using the Claudebot and engaging with it and talking with it and it doesn't integrate with any of your tools. So, it's really limiting its strength. This is why I went with the Mac Mini. But, as I'm going to go over a little bit later in this video, I'm actually returning my Mac Mini and you'll see why. And it might be the best option for you as well to not go with the Mac Mini. But, for 90% of people, I think the Mac Mini is the correct way to go. As for the VPS, I'd put at zero% of people. I think VPS is the wrong choice for basically everyone on planet Earth. And I think the people going with the VPS and preaching for the VPS are like trying to take some sort of contrarian stance cuz they don't like it when big Apple sells Mac minis. I just don't understand why anyone would go with the VPS. So then
the Mac Studio. I am actually, even though I think the Mac Mini is the best choice for 99. 9% of people out there, I'm actually returning my Mac Mini for not one Mac Studio, but two Mac Studios for $10,000 each. That's right. I just spent $20,000 on Claudebot. But let me tell you why. So, it has all the advantages of the Mac Mini. So, everything we went through with the Mac Mini, it has those advantages. It's exactly the same operating system. But here's the difference though, and here's why I think this changes everything and why I'm not only willing to spend $20,000, but I'm going to probably end up buying a third and fourth Mac Studio, is number one, free AI. You can with the Mac Studio with 512 GB of memory run pretty much any local model. The most powerful local model at the moment is Kimmy K2. 5, which is near Opus level intelligence, which Opus is the best AI model out there. It's the most powerful one. It's the best for Claudebot. You can get basically that level of power locally on your computer with Kimmy K 2. 5. Now, to run Kimmy K 2. 5, you will need two Mac Studios with 512 GB of memory each. It is a 600 gigabyte model, which means you need at least 600 GB of local memory to run it because it loads into the local memory. So, if you want the most powerful local model, you will need two Mac Studios maxed out. But you can run pretty much any other model with a single Mac Studio with the 512 GB of RAM. What does that mean? Why would you want to run a local AI model? Well, the advantages to that are one, it's free. You're just paying the cost of your power. You're not paying for tokens like you do with the API. Now, if you use the Opus API for everything right now, you're probably spending at least $1,000 a month on this. With local models, it's completely free. Two, the model is totally customizable. So if I want to tinker and change the model and try different things out with the model, I can do that. Three, privacy. All your queries will remain local. So I can literally unplug my Mac Studio from the internet in my apartment and it will still be able to run. It's not sending any of your data, any of your private data to the cloud. So if I want to have private conversations with my AI, I'm able to do that without the AI executives being able to read all my transcripts. And then what in my opinion is the most important strength of them all because of all those things I mentioned. You can run this 24/7 365. The whole point of Claudebot is that it is your 24/7 AI employee. That's its strength. There's never been an AI tool that can do that. The issue is if you hamstring Claudebot by either running it in the cloud, running it on a VPS or using a really expensive model like Opus that you can't quite use a ton because it's too expensive, it's not actually a 247 employee. But if you have a local model that doesn't cost you anything and is super intelligent, I can have it processing and doing things for me literally 247 365. So, I can achieve the actual vision of Claudebot that they had when they released this product. And that is why for me it is worth it for $20,000. I don't compare the $20,000 to like the price of Netflix or the price of an Xbox because if you do that, yeah, it seems really expensive. What I compare the price to is the price of hiring someone, right? The if you want to hire an employee right now, that's $100,000 a year. Even if you want to hire someone offshore who's on one of those really discount, cheaper Fiverr sites, that's still going to cost you thousands of dollars a year. So, if you compare it to that, this is actually a really good deal. The downsides to the Mac Studio are, yeah, it's expensive, $20,000. It's significantly more than the $600 Mac Mini or the free VPS. There's more setup to run models locally. That's not like a one click and it's good to go and it's running thing. There is a little bit of technical work needed for that. with AI. It makes it a lot easier, but it's harder to set up than all the other ones and it has the biggest footprint. I'm about to have two massive Mac studios sitting on my desk, uh, which is going to take up a lot of room. I actually literally, you can't see it, but I bought a much bigger desk yesterday. It took from IKEA that took me like 3 hours to build just so I can fit all these Mac Studios on the desk. I think the Mac Studio is worth it for you. If you are ready to go all the way in with Claudba, I don't think it's the solution for everyone. I would first either go with a dusty computer in your closet or a Mac Mini. See if it's right for you. See if you like the technology. See if you're getting value out of it. Then if you are and you really want to kick it up a notch and you have use cases that would be improved by having a local model running 24/7, 365, then you can go all the way in on a Mac Studio. I'm not sitting here recommending everyone go out and spend $20,000 like me. I'm a special case because I run a business by myself. I do content. This is going to make great videos for you guys when I show you how the Mac Studio runs. So, for me, it was, in my opinion, more than worth it. And I probably will end up buying the M5 Ultra when that comes out as well in the next few months and just have three Mac Studios all over my desk. So, if I were to rank this right now, honestly, in my opinion, I go Mac Mini1 dusty computer in your closet a very close second. Mac Studio 3 only if you're a power user and then VPS and oneclick launch services. I just don't think for most people you're going to get the value out of Claudebot. Requires tons of work and you're not going to get the most value out of Claudebot you can. I just think this is a way for the contrarian anti-corporate people on Twitter to say, "Hey, don't buy your Mac Mini. You're pumping the Apple stock. " Shut up. Let me know down below which you've gone with and which you are going to go with. Leave a like down below if you learned anything at all in this video. Subscribe and turn on notifications. All I do is create amazing content on Claudebot, AI, and making your life way more productive with all these tools. Also, let me know down below if there's any other videos having to do with Claudebot you'd like me to make as well. I film every single day. I have a lot of cool stuff coming out. I'm really sure you will enjoy. Hope this was helpful. I'll see you in the next video.