My OpenClaw Setup on Mac Studio

I've been seeing OpenClaw↗ everywhere lately. And if you haven't been under a rock, you have too.

It's an open-source personal AI assistant, the kind that runs on your own hardware, connects to your messaging apps to chat with you, and basically acts as a personal assistant that's always on. My twitter timeline has been full with people building wild setups with it. I figured I should try it before I fall too far behind.

So I did. And the setup ended up being more fun than I expected.

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The hardware: Mac Studio (No I haven't bought a new one)

About three years ago, I bought a Mac Studio (M1 Max) as my main computer. It served me well. But recently I picked up a MacBook as my daily driver, and the Studio had been unused ever since.

When I started setting up OpenClaw, this was the perfect use case. OpenClaw runs as a local gateway on your machine. It stays on, listens to your messages, and responds through whichever channels you connect, Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, you name it. It needs a machine that's always running. I had one.

So I wiped the Mac Studio clean. Fresh install of macOS. Nothing on it but OpenClaw.

What is OpenClaw, exactly?

Just for people who haven't heard much about it, OpenClaw↗ is a fully open-source personal AI assistant. You install it on your own device, point it at a model (I'm running Claude Opus 4.6), and it becomes your always-available assistant across whatever messaging platforms you connect.

The part that excited me most: it has a proper memory system. It remembers context across conversations. You can also give it skills, connect it to tools, and it can act on your behalf. It's closer to having a personal assistant that lives on your machine and knows your stuff than a typical chatbot.

I set it up with Telegram as the primary channel. I don't use Telegram for anything else, it's purely my OpenClaw interface now. The idea being: I can just text my assistant like I'm sending a WhatsApp message, and it handles things. Takes notes, remembers context, does tasks.

The reason this is even more interesting to me (apart from a thousand mind blowing use cases) is because I've tried so many second brain setups over the years. Notion, Obsidian, various note-taking apps. None of them stuck. The friction was always too high. With OpenClaw, the interface is just... a chat. You text it whatever you need and you can set it up so it organizes things for you. That simplicity might be what finally makes it work for me.

I'm still in the early days of actually configuring it, figuring out what skills to enable, what access to give it, what workflows make sense. I'll share more as I go deeper.

Making the Mac Studio headless

Here's the thing about repurposing a desktop Mac as an always-on server: it doesn't need a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. You just need it to stay awake.

For the Mac Studio, this was surprisingly simple. One setting:

System Settings > Energy Saver > "Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off"

That's it. Toggle that on, and the Mac Studio stays alive indefinitely with no display connected. No special software needed, no hacks. Just that one toggle.

Tailscale: the glue that makes everything work

This is where the setup gets good.

Tailscale↗ creates a private network between your devices. Once it's set up, every device gets a stable IP on your tailnet, and you can reach any device from any other device, no port forwarding, no dynamic DNS, no nothing.

I installed Tailscale on both the Mac Studio and my MacBook. I also set it to run on login and stay always-on so the connection never drops. Now I can SSH into my Mac Studio's terminal from my MacBook anytime, from anywhere. I just open a terminal and I'm in.

But here's the part I didn't expect: I can do it from my phone too.

SSH from my phone (yes, really)

I found this app called Echo↗, an SSH client for iOS. It's a one-time purchase of $2.99, no subscription, and the interface is gorgeous. It's built natively with Metal-accelerated rendering and Ghostty's terminal engine under the hood.

I added my Mac Studio as an SSH server in Echo, pointing it at the Tailscale IP. And now I have a full terminal session to my Mac Studio, from my phone.

The first time I opened it from the couch and saw my Mac Studio's terminal on my iPhone screen, I just sat there for a second. I can check what OpenClaw is doing, look at files, run commands, all from my pocket. That was really cool haha.

The fresh install angle

One thing I want to call out: I deliberately wiped the Mac Studio before setting any of this up. Clean macOS install. No old apps, no clutter, no leftover configs and no unwanted files it can access and give me nightmares lol.

I wanted to give OpenClaw a clean workspace, but also one where it cannot mess things up. I don't want to give it access to everything yet.

I'm still deciding what to install on it and what access to give. That's the part I'm actively exploring.

For what it's worth, I did first install OpenClaw on my MacBook to try it out. That was straightforward, just npm install -g openclaw@latest and run the onboarding wizard. Once I was comfortable with how it worked, I did the full headless setup on the Mac Studio.

The full picture

So here's what the setup looks like now:

What's next

I'm still in the "figuring it out" phase. OpenClaw has a huge feature surface, skills, browser control, cron jobs, multi-channel routing, voice mode. I've barely scratched the surface.

The things I'm most curious about exploring:

The second brain / note-taking workflow. Can I finally have a system that sticks? Every other system I've tried has failed. But the "just text it" interface feels promising.

What access to give it. OpenClaw can do a lot on the host machine, run commands, manage files, browse the web. I need to think carefully about what makes sense for my use case.

Skills and automation. There's a whole skills platform and a community registry. I want to explore what's out there and what could actually save me time.

I'll document it as I go. But yeah, this has been super cool, lol.

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If you want to try something similar, here are the pieces. The Mac Studio is really optional (I just had one lying around collecting dust) — OpenClaw runs on any Mac, Linux, or Windows (WSL2) machine.