Apple praised Perplexity yesterday during its second-quarter 2026 earnings call, and now the company is offering more details on why it’s building its first Mac personal computer platform. Here are the details.
The personal computer highlighted during Apple’s earnings call
Last month, Perplexity announced Personal Computer, a Mac-native platform designed to run primarily on a Mac mini (although it can run on any Mac) and serve as a user’s personal assistant agent running in their on-premises and cloud environments.
Here is Perplexity on a personal computer:
The personal computer is the future of work. It brings multi-model orchestration to your own machine, working across local files, applications and the web in a single system. On a Mac mini, it works 24/7, allowing you to start working from your phone and come back to it.
According to the company, the biggest advantage of Personal Computer is the recognition that a useful AI agent must operate in both on-premises and cloud environments, rather than being limited to “a chat window or running in an isolated virtual machine alongside your applications.”
Perplexity adds that Personal Computer “builds on the continuity that Apple users already expect to get their work done, no matter where they are.”
Yesterday, Apple CFO Kevan Parekh mentioned the product during Apple’s Q2 2026 earnings call, citing it as an example of developers choosing the Mac as a platform for “enterprise-grade AI assistants”:
Thanks to Apple silicon and this powerful unified memory architecture, leading AI developers, like Perplexity, choose Mac as their preferred platform for creating enterprise-grade AI assistants that power autonomous agents and improve workplace productivity.
His comment comes in a context where Mac mini and Mac Studio are sold out in several countries around the world, thanks to the success of agent platforms such as Personal Computer. Apple would later confirm that availability will remain extremely limited for several months.
Interestingly, Parekh’s comment comes on the heels of Perplexity’s invitation-only Ask NYC event, where the company’s CEO Aravind Srinivas highlighted the fact that the company has built a personal computer to run “on any Mac, with a Mac mini as one of the best ways to deploy it to full capacity.”
It also revealed that since its launch, Personal Computer “has completed more than $2.8 billion in equivalent work for Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers.”
At the event, Perplexity also announced a series of desktop updates aimed at businesses, including support for Microsoft Teams, native Excel integration now in beta, new workflow functionality for repeatable tasks, and deeper data connectors with Snowflake and Databricks.
Perplexity also announced a partnership with 1Password that will allow the personal computer to act in authenticated tools without exposing the user’s credentials to the model.
To learn more about what’s new on Perplexity’s personal computer, follow this link.
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