Apple has promised a smarter Siri for years, and a Mac utility company just shipped something closer to that promise. MacPaw, the developer behind CleanMyMac and Setapp, launched Eney, an AI assistant for Mac and iPhone that tracks what is happening across your apps, files, and system, prepares the next step, and asks before it acts.
That last part matters. Plenty of assistants wait for a prompt. Eney is built to be proactive, which is the harder design problem. An assistant that jumps in too often becomes noise, and one that acts without permission becomes a liability. MacPaw’s answer is a confirmation step before anything happens, a sensible choice given how nervous people still are about agents touching their files.
On the Mac, the feature set is practical rather than flashy. Eney offers suggestions triggered by copying content, so grabbing a snippet of text can surface a relevant action. It also transcribes meetings without joining as a bot, then produces notes and follow-ups. And it ships with ready-made workflows like Morning Brief and Plan My Day.
The meeting feature is the one to watch. Tools like Otter, Fireflies, and Fathom have built businesses on meeting notes, but many of them show up as a visible participant on the call, which some clients and legal teams dislike. Local, bot-free capture removes that friction. Granola has made a similar argument on the Mac and gained a loyal following. Eney is now competing in that lane as part of a broader package.
The bigger story is who is building this. Apple Intelligence has been slow to deliver the personal, context-aware assistant Apple demoed, and that gap leaves room for third parties. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity are all pushing desktop agents, but they sit outside the operating system. MacPaw has something they lack: years of trust on Mac machines, a distribution channel through Setapp, and deep knowledge of macOS internals from its utility products.
There are real risks. Apple could close the gap with its own features and make a third-party assistant redundant. Privacy is the other question. An assistant that sees across apps and files needs users to believe where the data goes, and MacPaw will have to be specific about what runs on-device and what goes to the cloud.
Still, this is worth paying attention to. Morning Brief and Plan My Day are not new ideas, but packaging them with system-level awareness and an approval step is a credible take on what an assistant should be. If you live in meetings and juggle many apps, Eney is a reasonable trial. If you want a fully autonomous agent, this is deliberately more cautious. For Mac users who have been waiting on Apple, that caution may be exactly the appeal.
