Hey, I made the same decision (except I went with the 24gb model, not the 16gb). The other thing I like about having it on a separate Mac Mini is that it it's completely sandboxed, and I don't log into anything with it on my personal machine. It's VERY nice to have this as an isolated environment, and the extra VRAM means that I can run my own local models, and it's got enough beef to do long-running tasks (right now I have it chugging through several gigs of images and building embeddings for them with DINOv2) -- that's the sort of local workload that would crush a Raspberry Pi, but the Macbook is hitting 17 images per second -- all managed by OpenClaw.

All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for GPU resources in the background.