Perplexity has officially shipped Personal Computer to all Max subscribers and waitlist users starting today, completing a rollout arc that began with the product's unveiling at the Ask 2026 developer conference on March 11 and moved through early access invitations earlier this month. The release transforms what was previously a gated preview into a broadly available capability for the $200/month Max tier, and it marks Perplexity's most ambitious step yet toward operating as a system-level agent rather than a standalone assistant.
Today we're releasing Personal Computer.
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) April 16, 2026
Personal Computer integrates with the Perplexity Mac App for secure orchestration across your local files, native apps, and browser.
We’re rolling this out to all Perplexity Max subscribers and everyone on the waitlist starting today. pic.twitter.com/kxgFQFo7BB
Personal Computer integrates directly with the Perplexity Mac app to orchestrate actions across local files, native macOS applications, and the browser. According to the company, it securely connects to any folder to search, read, and write files locally, while also reaching into iMessage, Apple Mail, Calendar, and other native Mac apps. A floating "Start a task..." prompt bar sits over the desktop, with action icons for files, images, and voice input, and a listening overlay suggests voice-activated control is part of the package. When configured on a dedicated Mac mini, Personal Computer runs continuously in the background, and users can kick off tasks from their iPhone with 2FA gating sensitive actions, a setup Perplexity frames as a "digital proxy" operating around the clock. The security model retains explicit approval for sensitive steps, a full audit trail, and a kill switch.
Personal Computer extends the cloud-based Perplexity Computer that launched in late February for Max subscribers, which orchestrates 19 models for async multi-step workflows and gained Skills support in early March. The local variant pushes that architecture onto the user's own machine, giving it persistent context over personal data that cloud agents cannot touch. For Perplexity, this is a strategic move to compete not only with OpenAI's Computer Use and Anthropic's agent offerings, but also with Apple Intelligence itself, arguably overlapping with territory Apple has been slower to claim. For Max subscribers, the immediate benefit is a single agent capable of reconciling calendar, mail, messages, and local documents in one flow, setting up Perplexity's Mac client as something closer to an operating layer than an app.
