Thirty-six gigabytes of RAM is the price of admission, and that single number says more about local AI than any press release. Perplexity just made it possible to run its entire Computer agent on a Mac, and most people’s laptops won’t qualify.
The company announced that anyone with a recent Apple Silicon Mac and at least 36GB of RAM can now run the full Computer experience on-device, including the harness and orchestrator. This follows Hybrid Compute, introduced in early September, which let users split work between frontier models and local ones. Going fully local was the obvious next step.
The pitch is privacy and cost. Give Computer access to Notes and Mail, ask for a prioritized to-do list, and none of your email content leaves the machine. Perplexity also says local runs give users more control over credit spend, which matters if you’ve watched agent tasks burn through usage limits.
You get two model choices: Qwen 3.6, or PPLX Pro, Perplexity’s own post-trained version of Qwen 3.6 tuned for Computer tasks. That’s a notable detail. Perplexity is building on open-weight models and adding its value in post-training and orchestration, rather than competing on raw model training. If a task needs more power, you can authorize a call to one of more than 15 frontier models. Code and tool execution run in an isolated sandbox, and Perplexity says the same protections apply in its cloud version.
So does it matter? Somewhat. Apple has pushed on-device AI for years, and tools like Ollama and LM Studio already let enthusiasts run open models locally. But those are mostly chat interfaces. A local agent that touches your mail, notes and files is a harder problem, and a more useful one. Rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic still lean heavily on the cloud for their agent products, so Perplexity has a small opening on privacy-minded users.
The catch is hardware. A 36GB requirement rules out base-model MacBook Airs and most Windows machines, and it’s limited to paying Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers. Local models like Qwen 3.6 also won’t match frontier systems on hard reasoning, which is why the fallback option exists. That hybrid design is probably the realistic model for the next few years.
It’s available now. Update the Mac app, follow the in-app prompts to download a local model, and you’re set. If you already own a high-memory Mac and care about keeping email off someone else’s servers, it’s worth trying. Everyone else can treat it as a preview of where agents are headed.
