Attendees bring their laptops to install the OpenClaw AI agent during a Baidu event in Beijing, China, on Tuesday, March 17, 2026.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | getty images
BEIJING — So many people in China are rushing to try the OpenGL artificial intelligence tool that they’re driving up the prices of secondhand Mac computers.
That’s according to Jeremy Gee, chief strategy officer and general manager of international business ATRenewalA used consumer electronics buyer and reseller who works with Apple and retailers JD.com In mainland China.
OpenClaw is an AI agent, a device that can autonomously conduct individual tasks such as sending emails and shopping online. According to American cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard, usage in China currently exceeds that of the US.
However, free-to-download software also poses security risks, leading many users to run OpenClave on a cloud computing server or laptop separate from their primary device. If allowed direct access to personal computers, an AI agent could autonomously alter private data such as banking information, or enable hackers to access it more easily.
As people in China are jumping on the OpenClaw trend, they are turning to pre-owned computers, Ji said in a phone interview.
He compared the surge in demand to the pandemic, when many people bought more personal computing devices as they worked and spent more time at home.
As a result, from March to May this year, ATRenew is keeping its prices for Apple products the same as those seen during the peak fall season around new iPhone releases. This is in contrast to the general price decline during the spring.
Gee said prices for new MacBooks are typically 15% higher than used MacBooks sold through ATRenew.
Apple’s self-developed chips, the latest of which is called M5, are generally more power-efficient than chips in computers running Windows systems. For early OpenCL adopters, the popular hardware of choice has been Apple’s Mac Mini.
ATRenew’s Ji said the company is seeing people trading in their MacBooks with older M1 and M2 chips for computers with M4 or M5 chips. “We see increasing demand for laptops, PCs overall, but Mac devices benefit the most from that trend (to try OpenClaw).”
Consumer interest in more powerful secondhand MacBooks “is still going very strong,” Ji said, noting that Atrenew has had to raise its prices to buy back the devices to increase the supply of secondhand Macs available for purchase. He predicted this trend could continue “throughout the year.”
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Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer, launched OpenClaw in November. But the latest wave of interest in China surged earlier this month Tencent And other Chinese tech companies used OpenClaw to attract more users.
ATRenew’s Ji declined to share the exact volume of MacBooks handled since late February, but noted that the average number of devices the company processed last year was about 100,000 per day. He expects the share of MacBooks and other laptops or personal computing devices to grow to 20% of the business from 15% now.
Jensen Huang, CEO of the US chip giant NVIDIAtold CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday that OpenCL is “definitely the next ChatGPT.”
“It is now the largest, most popular, most successful open-source project in the history of humanity,” Huang said.
The overall demand for AI computing power has also driven up the prices of memory chips, a key component of smartphones and laptops.
Ji said chip price increases, especially in China, have encouraged more consumers to buy used Apple smartphones rather than flagship Android-based devices.
