I’ve been doing something similar with an old m2. It isn’t powerful enough for local models, well sufficient local models but for openclaw and Claude it’s been perfect.
MacBook m1/m2 also are cheap enough now vs an Mac mini which I was surprised about, not too surprised but yeah..
I currently have Claude Desktop installed on a separate Mac mini M4 and control it with Dispatch. Is there a reason to do this method, it still seems the way I have it setup it has full control over the local account I gave it on the Mac mini.
Dispatch/Cowork is basically claude code in a container. The section "Why not run it in a container?" would address your question in the post. One example I run into is that Cowork won't download and fill out or read pdfs or other files due to container permissions. Vanilla claude code has no problem using curl and wget.
I’ve been doing something similar with an old m2. It isn’t powerful enough for local models, well sufficient local models but for openclaw and Claude it’s been perfect.
MacBook m1/m2 also are cheap enough now vs an Mac mini which I was surprised about, not too surprised but yeah..
I am sorry to report that 16GB+ MacBook Airs/MacBooks have become unreasonably expensive - probably from use cases like this.
Dispatch works great, and I have reversed the setup so Claude can ssh-spawn sessions on my homelab for non-Mac dependent work
I currently have Claude Desktop installed on a separate Mac mini M4 and control it with Dispatch. Is there a reason to do this method, it still seems the way I have it setup it has full control over the local account I gave it on the Mac mini.
Dispatch/Cowork is basically claude code in a container. The section "Why not run it in a container?" would address your question in the post. One example I run into is that Cowork won't download and fill out or read pdfs or other files due to container permissions. Vanilla claude code has no problem using curl and wget.