Perplexity on Mac: Intention, not attention
The golden dawn of the AI Revolution is becoming easier to see, and it’s beginning to look like all the same brands of application design are reinventing themselves as AI agents.
That’s why you see ServiceNow link up with Thrive’s agentic TransformAI platform, that’s why you can expect to see some radical new imaginings around Apple’s App Intents architecture at WWDC (now with agentics of change).
Intention is the new currency
That’s also why you see the pure AI players begin to jump into the same battlespace, including Perplexity’s somewhat anachronistically titled ‘Personal Computer’ set of agents jumping aboard the Mac.
If attention was the old currency, intention is the new gold, and AI companies, neo-AI companies, and many firms hoping that a new logo and the two letters A.I. placed adjacent to their existing brand names will keep their business hearts beating are entering that space.
The model sees apps stop being destinations and become capabilities. The “home screen” becomes less about icons and more about entry points into agents, while Apple’s UI becomes even more strategically interesting.There are agents everywhere. But the winner may eventually be the platform that best routes these requests.
The war of AI will be fought one Desktop at a time
Apple, of course, can smile a little at this given it now provides the best already mass market, already widely deployed, already widely used desktop/mobile ecosystem to support this intention economy, which is why much of this war will be fought in territory the company controls.
The future of AI will be decided one Home screen, and one Desktop space at a time. Let’s not yet think about the inevitable balkanization of everything as governments and business recognize the need for sovereign AI, which inevitably leads us towards a neo-Internet constrained by national interest.
Accepting, then, that when it comes to the tools people use Apple (and Linux) will be where the future is made, then it seems important to look at what Perplexity is offering with its latest AI app for Macs. I think this matters in the short term because we expect Apple to empower its customers to select the AI they want to use across their system later this year, news of which should come at WWDC – is Perplexity’s offer an early glance at what this may be like?
It also matters because the solution Perplexity has introduced hints at how agentic AI will change our relationships with our computers and with our data. OpenClaw also illustrated this, of course – and it seems appropriate to think about how these services set the scene for the future introduction of on-prem, self-hosted AI services.
So, what does Perplexity Personal Computer do?
Personal Computer is available to all users via a new Perplexity Mac app.
- It’s an advanced version of Perplexity Computer that can run tasks across local files, native Mac apps, the web, and Perplexity’s secure servers.
- You can start tasks from an iPhone that use local files on your Mac; a Mac mini can be used for always-on agents.
- It’s included with Perplexity Pro and Max plans.
- The assistant can handle everyday tasks (including attachments and dictation) by routing work across multiple models (e.g., Gemini for research, Nano Banana for images, ChatGPT for long-context memory and broader search).
- Much of the processing is shifted to the cloud.
- That also means you need to share your personal data in the cloud, which means data retention, access and control of that information should be a big thought before using the service.
How will you use it?
Three example tasks to help show what this might be able to do:
- Request comprehensive reports by asking it to research multiple topics, web sources, and academic databases in parallel.
- Turn multi-sourced data into charts, diagrams, or reports.
- Perplexity can analyze SEC filings, pull data from Coinbase or Quartr, and monitor Polymarket trends
I’m quite interested in the implications of this solution, but it leaves me looking ahead to similar solutions working on-device, if that is ever possible. All the same, it seems to me that the future of computing is not AI-powered apps, but AI-mediated reality. Intention is the new currency.
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