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.

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 And in a few weeks OpenClaw will be outdated or deemed too unsecure anyways, it will never be a long-term products, it's just some crazy experiment for the memes.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

The good part about OpenClaw: once you wire it up to connect to your important information it can do a lot of cool things. The bad part about OpenClaw: in order for it to do cool things you have to worry it up to your important information. Therein lies the challenge, to make it useful it needs to be connected, but being connected means that there is now a single point of failure or compromise. And unless you're extremely sophisticated, you are the mercy of the provider to guarantee that nothing bad happens. OpenClaw does not do this. In fact, I would say they do the very opposite of it, they declaim any responsibility or attempt to make it secure. Leaking API keys? Check. Allowing malicious plugins? Check. Being insecure by default? Check and check.

I'm no Apple fan, but they aren't in the business of foisting pleasantly packaged footguns on their customers.

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.

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.

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.

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.