By Tim Sweezy
Publication Date: 2026-05-08 10:23:00
Perplexity has opened up its Personal Computer feature to all Mac users through a new desktop app, the company announced on Thursday. The app lets AI agents work across your local files, installed applications, and the web, handling multi-step tasks that would normally require a lot of manual switching between programs.
Personal Computer didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s an expansion of Perplexity Computer, the company’s general-purpose AI “digital worker,” which was designed to handle complex tasks from start to finish. The Mac app takes that system off Perplexity’s servers and brings it closer to where you actually work.
Perplexity describes the result as a “personal orchestrator” that splits work between your Mac and its own servers, depending on what’s needed. In practice, that means it can read and write your local files, open and interact with Mac apps, and browse the web, all within the same task. Files it creates are kept in a secure sandbox, and everything it does is auditable and reversible.
Pressing both Command keys brings up Personal Computer, and it responds to typed or spoken instructions, automatically surfacing useful quick actions. Personal Computer works on any Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later, though Perplexity recommends the Mac mini as the ideal machine because it lets the agent run continuously around the clock, though it can be difficult to find right now. The appeal there is practical: you can kick off a task from your iPhone…
