Perplexity just created a product category that did not exist yesterday.
It is called the Personal Computer. Not a laptop. Not a cloud service. A physical M4 Mac mini that sits in your home or office, runs 24/7, and hosts an AI agent with persistent access to your local files, your apps, and your sessions.
$200 per month. Max subscribers only. 10,000 compute credits included.
What it actually does
The agent runs locally. It is not a cloud chatbot you talk to through a browser. It is a process on a machine in your physical space, with access to everything on that machine. Your documents, your code, your email, your calendar.
It can coordinate other AI systems. It has persistent memory across sessions. You can control it from your phone when you are away. There is a kill switch and an audit trail.
This is not an assistant you summon. It is an assistant that is always there, always running, always aware of your digital context.
Why “always-on” changes everything
Every AI tool you use today is stateless. You open ChatGPT, have a conversation, close the tab. Next time, it starts from zero. Even the tools with memory features reconstruct context from stored summaries. They are not actually running between your sessions.
Perplexity’s approach is fundamentally different. The AI does not sleep. It does not lose context when you close a tab. It is a persistent process on a persistent machine with persistent access to your persistent data.
That means it can notice things you did not ask about. A file that changed while you were asleep. An email that arrived at 3am that matches something you were researching last week. A pattern across your documents that only becomes visible when you can see all of them at once, continuously.
The $200 question
Is anyone going to pay $200 a month for an AI on a Mac mini?
The honest answer: probably not many, yet. This is a category-creation product, not a mass-market play. The first customers will be power users, developers, and people who are already spending more than $200/month on various AI subscriptions.
But the concept matters more than the first iteration. If an always-on local AI agent is genuinely useful, the price will come down. The hardware will get cheaper. The competitors will appear.
What matters is that someone built it. Someone shipped the idea of AI as a physical appliance that lives in your space and knows your context. That is a different category from everything else on the market.
What I keep thinking about
I am building something similar. Not a Mac mini product. But the idea of persistent AI that runs continuously, maintains context, and operates autonomously between interactions. The problems Perplexity is solving with a physical machine are the same problems I think about every day.
The difference between a tool you use and a tool that runs alongside you is the difference between a calculator and a colleague. One does what you ask. The other notices what you have not asked yet.