By Susan Hill
Publication Date: 2026-04-23 11:49:00
Perplexity’s new bet is $200 a month and an always-on Mac. Personal Computer for Mac launched this month to Perplexity Max subscribers — a tier that costs ten times the company’s $20 Pro plan — and it does what chat-based assistants until now could not: live on your machine, read your local files and Apple apps, and keep working when you close your laptop. The company is arguing that the next computer is not a new device. It’s a persistent agent running on the Mac you already own.
Press both Command keys at the same time anywhere on macOS and Personal Computer opens a prompt. Type or speak a task — sort the Downloads folder, draft responses to unread iMessages, pull the Q3 numbers from the PDFs on the desktop and compare them to the public filings — and the agent executes. It does not return you to a browser tab. It works across the active apps already open, sees what is on screen, and produces files, emails and calendar events as outputs. What Perplexity is selling is not another assistant to consult. It is an orchestrator that does the task while you do something else.
The technical pitch is specific. Personal Computer runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, but the company explicitly recommends a Mac mini as the host machine — a lower-cost always-on box that lets the agent stay active 24 hours a day while the user’s primary laptop is closed. Tasks can be started remotely from an iPhone, with two-factor authentication completing…