Perplexity Personal Computer - Your Mac Just Became an AI Agent

A few weeks ago, I made a video on something called Perplexity Computer. If you missed it, it was a cloud-based AI tool that would actually do the work for you. Research, build documents, even write code, all from a single prompt. Well, Perplexity took that to the next step. They released something called Personal Computer, and it runs directly on a Mac. Uh, it can read your files, open your apps, send your messages, and keep working in the background even when you're not at your desk at all. So today I'm going to show you what it is, how to get it, and how to actually use it. And more importantly, what kind of task is it actually worth using it for? Because this isn't a AI does everything video. It's a genuinely useful for something and not worth your time for others. Let's get into it.

Hi, I'm Jamie and welcome to Teachers Tech. First, the name's a little confusing. Personal computer isn't a physical computer. It's software that runs on your Mac. It's the Mac version of Perplexity Computer, which I covered in a previous video. I'll link that right up here and in the description. Now, the difference matters because the original Perplexity Computer lives in the cloud in its own sandbox. Personal computer brings that same AI agent onto your actual machine where it can see your files, open your apps, and work inside your real workflow. The way perplexity puts it, it's as a regular operating system takes instructions. An AI operating system takes objectives. You tell it what you want done and it figures out the rest. And if you run it on a Mac Mini, it can work in the background 24 hours a day, whether you're home or not. Okay, let's talk about how to actually get it. And this is where some of you are going to tap

out and that's fair. Uh, personal computer is only available on the Perplexity Max. That's that top tier plan and it costs $200 a month. Perplexity Pro, the $20 a month plan, doesn't include personal computer. Although prousers can still use the web-based version, and I know that's a lot, this is clearly being aimed at professionals, small business owners, and power users who are going to offload hours onto it per week. Now, for the more casual user, Pro still makes way more sense. On hardware, personal computer will run on a Mac with Mac OS 14, Sonoma, or later, but Perplexity recommends a Mac Mini. And the reason is for that because the Mac Mini is small, quiet, and designed to stay on all the time. It can run personal computer 24/7, so you can start a task from your phone while you're out and then the Mini just handles it at home. Setupwise, once you have your Perplexity Mac set up, you can just come over here, and I'll put the link to this

down below in the description. Just download it for your Mac and go through the normal install. You'll see when you open it up for the first time that it's going to ask for some accessibility. So, I'm going to just enable and I am going to give it full disk access for this demo. But you make sure to go through and find out what's your best fit for you. And now we're ready to go.

First, I'm just going to bring up notes. And now I'm going to open up personal computer by pressing my left and right commands. Now, this is what I want to point out first. When I press them both together, when I have an app open, personal computer opens right on top of whatever I'm doing. Now, notice something useful. When I trigger personal computer inside notes, the tool menu shows me note specific shortcuts. So, notice right here it says kind of notes. And if I go over here to tools, I see all the things that I can do with it here, whether it be create notes, view notes, browse folders, search notes, and so on. So, let me just jump over to mail really quickly. So

if I have my mail open and I do the same thing, look at this. Now, it's specific to the mail. And if I go to my shortcuts, you'll be able to see what I can directly do with personal computer. If I go ahead and prompt it and it's showing me things like compose emails, read emails, search emails. It's appaw aare. Whatever app I'm going to be in, the quick shortcuts are for that app. So, I could go ahead and do a prompt like this and it will go ahead and make that email. You can see it working up top. It checked my calendars, make sure the time was there, drafted the reply. If I'm going back over to my email right now, look at this in draft. Here it is right here. So, it did this with perplexity computer. You could see how it was working. and then it actually took control and wrote the email in here that I can look at and hit send now. Okay

let me give you another quick example. So, I'll hit my both my commands. I want to point out this too right here with the apps I can uh have more shortcuts to different apps. So, if I click on finder, you can see the different ones down here and then I have uh the finder ones. I can go find something from here. I could even create a file. Let me give you another example. So, I'm going to say this with create files. write me a story about a dog and a cat and place it on my desktop. I can see right now it's creating the files and you're going to see them appear on my desktop. And here we go. I have a file right here that just appeared on my desktop. I can see here's the story that it wrote. Now, all of this is fine, but it's not really what I see as big timesaving things. So, this next one will be something multi-step and something that would save me time.

Okay, this next part is the most important thing I'm going to say in this video. And I want you to stay with me for it. Because the first day I spent with personal computer, I was actually a little underwhelmed. And I want to tell you why. So don't make the same mistake. My first instinct was to ask it to do small things. Send a quick email, add a calendar, vent, take a note. And here's the honest truth. For quick one-off tasks like those, personal computer is not faster than just doing it yourself. Sometimes it's slower because it pauses to ask for clarifying questions, which is good behavior, but it adds times. So, you go in expecting this to speed up every little task, you're going to be disappointed. Now, that's not what this tool is for. Where it genuinely changes your day is on tasks where you've been quietly putting off these kind of tedious multi-step crossapp work that eats hours into your week and then you haven't even noticed anymore because you've just accepted it. Now, that's where personal computer earns its keep. Now, let me show you some examples. I just wanted to point out just hit the plus at the end and choose what model you want to be using for this. Let's give this one a try. I'm going to ask it to do this.

Look through my email for the last 30 days and find every receipt or invoice. Pull out the date, vendor amount, and what it was for. Put it into a spreadsheet. So, I'm going to just send this. So, normally this would take me a lot of time and I'm asking it to be put into a spreadsheet. So, now it's going to go into my email, find those receipts, put them into a spreadsheet for me. Okay, so look at this. March 2026 here. They're going through the information. It goes through my email and at the very end, it's giving me a spreadsheet here that I can go ahead and open. tells me the description, the vendor, and I can go ahead and download this as an Excel or put it into my Google Drive. Okay

demo three. This one goes a little further because not every receipt shows up in your email. A lot of them are paper receipts you snapped a photo of and so you wouldn't lose them. They end up sitting in a folder, maybe on your desktop, so or maybe your photo library. In this case, right here, I have this March receipts and you can see these are just pictures. I'll give you a few snapshots here what they look like. You can see how this one is or how uh this one is. So, they're all type of different type of photos in here. So, what I'm going to get it to do this time, so let's go ahead and open it up. I'm going to give it this task in the Marshall Receipts folder on my desktop. Read every photo. Pull out the date, vendor amount, and category for each one. Make a spreadsheet with totals at the bottom and a pie chart showing my spending by category. Let's see what happens. I can see it's already looking through the receipts. Okay, ready to check this out. Let's take a look. So, I'm just going to go down. We can see that it I could see before it was pulling through. It went through the PNG files here. We'll keep going. And one thing I'm really curious about here it is. So, it did pull the information out from each of those receipts. It has the name. It's this one right here. I was curious about the supermarket one because the total wasn't really legible. You couldn't see it, but you could see the subtotals and looking at this. So, it did. So, it noticed that. So, looking at receipt 10, the supermarket, it did an addition because on the receipt and I'll show you that right here. If I open up that receipt here, this will be it. And you can see you can't see the sub the total, but you could see this. So, it actually went through and uh went through and fixed that uh for me with those totals. So, let's keep going here. And we went through kept going, kept going. Where's my spreadsheet here? So, a little bit of thinking all this stuff here. So, it's building. Oh, here we go. Here's the spreadsheet here. Let's go ahead and just open this up. Uh we have categories at the bottom. I'm just going to go ahead and open in browser. Actually, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this time. Export to my Google Drive. So, I could go to Excel. Um, so here we go. Here is the it in Google Drive. Here's all the different receipts in here. We have a total. I'll go to category over here. Here is all the different categories. And there's the pie chart. So, in total, that took about 4 and 1/2 minutes of me just waiting for it. Now I want to

point out if you put the app on your phone and you have perplex the computer on your phone the app you can give request and it will take over your computer as well. So you can send it request from your phone and it will still be able to act on your computer. So in this case if I said pull the top three uh highest receipts out and then create a spreadsheet it would work even from my phone. So, look at this. I'll move down and you can see it went through, did the same thing, was able to read the receipts and I sent this from my phone, but it's still connecting and able to do everything. So, you could be standing in a line at a grocery store and sending that instructions to your computer and it will go and do it for you.

Before I wrap up, a few things that marketing doesn't lead with. Personal computer isn't autonomous. You still have to give it task. It's a tool you direct, not a co-orker who takes initiative. Like every AI agent right now, including Anthropics Claw computer use, it occasionally misreads what's on the screen or clicks the wrong thing. It's better at like this structured repeatable task than unusual interfaces. The AI processing happens on Perplexity servers, not on your Mac. So, if local only matters to you for privacy, this isn't that. And the safeguards are real. Sensitive actions require your approval like you just saw with that email. Every session has a full audit trail and there's a kill switch that stops it instantly.

So, should you pay $200 a month for this? For most of you watching, honestly, probably not. If you're using AI occasionally for writing or research, Perplexity Pro at $20 a month is still the right fit. Who this makes sense for would be maybe people whose time is valuable enough that offloading two or three hours of tedious work a week pays for itself. Maybe consultants, small business owners, professionals drowning emails. Uh anyone who's been thinking, I need a personal assistant. This might be genuinely be that at a fraction of the cost of hiring one. For the rest of us, this is where the whole industry is heading. An AI that sits on your machine and handles all that boring work. Today it costs $200 a month. In a month, a year, or maybe two, some version of this will be built into every operating system. Thanks for watching this time on Teachers Tech. I'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials.