These AI tools make my life much easier on the Mac

Press once to capture a conversation, and Gem connects it to what you discussed weeks ago — surfacing the earlier thread with a source link. Nearly four years into the latest AI boom sparked by ChatGPT, here are the tools that have actually stuck.

Fair warning: you have probably read or heard about most, if not all, of the tools I’m about to describe. But that is partly the point of this article.

What Happened

While it is always great to learn of a highly obscure, hidden gem just waiting to be found, it has been my experience that sometimes mainstream products are mainstream for a reason. That is particularly true for AI-powered tools, which tend to.

• Currently, Perplexity Pro users who pay $20 per month must purchase credits to use this feature, whereas Perplexity Max users who pay $200 per month receive 10,000 credits per month and can also buy.

• I recently used LM Studio during a flight, running Google’s Gemma 4 model with 12 billion parameters, and it worked just as well as if I had been using ChatGPT’s web-based trillion-parameter models.

• The good news is that AI labs and the open-source community are getting increasingly good at producing smaller, more efficient models that can still deliver impressive results.

Key Details

What does make a difference, however, is how much you manage to get out of these tools. And here is the thing: not all tools are meant for everyone, AI-powered or not.

• Granted, the number of models you’ll be able to run locally on your Mac depends quite a bit on your tech specs, but LM Studio makes it extremely easy to figure out which models.

• Even if you opt out of having your data used for training, that information still needs to leave your device and be processed elsewhere, which can already be a deal breaker depending on the.

• Second, local models are also a great alternative for users dealing with information they wouldn’t want (or are not allowed) to send to a third-party server.

Why It Matters

Below, you’ll find some examples of how I have been using these tools to streamline and improve my work, which will hopefully spark a few ideas for your own workflow. Better yet, if you have a favorite tool or use case that.

• First, they don’t require an active internet connection, which can be useful in certain situations.

• But local models do have their advantages.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by 9to5Mac as more details emerge