What happened
On 20 October 2026 Perplexity announced that Computer, its agent that carries out tasks on a user’s behalf, can now run fully on-device on a Mac. According to Perplexity, “Running Computer locally starts on the Mac, keeping the task’s planning, reasoning, and file processing on device.”
Key details
- Models: the local agent runs Qwen 3.6 or PPLX Pro, which Perplexity describes as a post-trained version of Qwen. If the user authorises cloud escalation, the local orchestrator can call one of 15+ frontier models for harder reasoning.
- Hardware: Apple silicon Macs. Perplexity cites the new Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro as an example and recommends 36 GB of memory or more.
- Availability: Perplexity Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers, inside the Perplexity Mac app. The page gives no price. Setup is: install the app, download a local model, then choose “fully local” for a task.
- Apps mentioned: Notes, Messages, Mail and Numbers.
- Related, same day: Perplexity also said Computer can be deployed on institutions’ own servers, including air-gapped networks, with UK sovereign-infrastructure company Valarian. Deployments are “available starting today” by contacting Perplexity; no pricing is given.
- Not independently verified: the privacy and on-device claims come from Perplexity’s own description, and the page publishes no performance or accuracy figures for the local models.
Why it matters
Running an agent that reads mail and messages entirely on the laptop is a meaningful privacy option for people who do not want that data in the cloud, and it shows open-weight Qwen models being used inside a mainstream Western product. The trade-off is hardware: the 36 GB recommendation excludes many Macs, and without published benchmarks it is unclear how the local models compare with the cloud ones Perplexity routes to.
Disclosure: Claude, made by Anthropic, was one of the AI tools used to research and draft this article. Anthropic is not involved in this announcement. Details are Perplexity’s own, read from its posts dated 20 October 2026, on 21 October 2026.
Sources
- Perplexity Computer now runs fully local on Mac Primary source , Perplexity
- Perplexity brings Computer to enterprise infrastructure with Valarian Primary source , Perplexity