Apple is all in on AI for the Mac. It’s called Apple Intelligence, and it’s really only starting to get off the ground.
Meanwhile, OpenAI went ahead and launched its own ChatGPT app earlier this year, and supported it with a recent update that made it even more useful, bringing ChatGPT’s web-searching powers to its Mac app.
I’ve been trying out the latest iteration in macOS Sequoia, and so far, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with how big of a difference it makes. With its incredible abilities, web search integration, and a few clever Mac-friendly touches, ChatGPT’s macOS app has a huge amount going for it — and finally makes my MacBook feel like a proper “AI PC.” It’s certainly become a must-have entry among the best Mac apps to download.
Picture this
ChatGPT’s Mac app uses OpenAI’s flagship 4o model, which can understand text, image, and voice inputs. By default, ChatGPT will try to interpret which of those modes you want to use, but you can lock in on one or the other by pressing forward slash (/) and choosing either “picture,” “search,” or “reason.”
Image creation is impressive as long as you provide ChatGPT with enough information to go on. Unsurprisingly, tell it to “create me a landscape” and you may not get exactly what you had in mind. Try something more detailed — “create a snowy landscape set in the Norwegian fjords. It’s midday, there are snowcapped mountains, and local wildlife is out in abundance,” for example — and the chatbot produces a detailed image for you.
There are still the kind of oddities we’ve grown used to AI producing (my image featured an animal that looked like a cross between a wolf and a reindeer), but you can ask for refinements or for ChatGPT to try again, and the results are generally very competent.
Voice mode, on the other hand, is for when you’re not at your keyboard or just prefer speaking to ChatGPT. How well it works depends on what you ask it — try asking it for recipes, for example, and it’ll find some good ones, but will read all the steps and ingredients at such a fast pace that you will struggle to take notes. You can’t see the text output until you end the voice chat, which is fine for some topics but less helpful when you’re trying to follow cooking instructions.
Pick ChatGPT’s “reason” option and you tap into OpenAI’s o1 model. This is for “solving hard problems,” OpenAI says, and specializes in science, math, and coding tasks. It takes longer to operate than 4o but is much more able to solve challenging and complex requests. Still, it’s beyond anything I need ChatGPT for, and while I occasionally ask it for help with things like Excel equations, the regular GPT-4o model can easily handle that with no need to rope in o1.
The Google killer
Over the past few years, I’ve been getting more and more dissatisfied with Google. Its search results are frequently unhelpful and inaccurate, it has an infuriating tendency to simply ignore my search terms (even when they’re put in quote marks), and trying to find specific solutions to niche problems is often nigh-on impossible.
And that’s the real draw of ChatGPT’s Mac app for me. Instead of loading up a web browser and getting hit-and-miss results from Google, I can just open ChatGPT and get the answers I need with its ability to search the web.
Compared side-by-side, Google’s search results page loads faster than ChatGPT can finish answering my queries. But ChatGPT wins in the long run because its web answers are frequently more useful than anything Google can find. Whereas Google has a short AI snippet at the top of its results and then a long list of web pages (pages that I’ve often found directly contradict the AI overview), ChatGPT takes the time to fully explain its answers, breaking them down into sections and bullet points where necessary. Instead of having to click through various websites and trawl through mountains of text, I get everything neatly summarized with minimal effort. Who wouldn’t want that?
For instance, I asked ChatGPT to tell me the result of Liverpool’s recent Champions League clash against Real Madrid. Not only did it give me the score but it included a match report with key details from the game, plus extra reading, info on what the result meant for both teams, and even the historic context of the tie. It was exactly what I needed and more. I could find that info using Google, but I’d have to click through several websites to get it all.
Here’s another example. I’ve been playing Stardew Valley’s new 1.6 update and wanted some layout inspiration for my farm. Ask ChatGPT and it includes both images and text tips full of good ideas. There’s more packed into a few paragraphs than Google can muster with its traditional web page results and, importantly, it gives me certainty right away, without needing to click through multiple different destinations.
I don’t use ChatGPT every time I want something from the web. Google is still better if I have a nebulous concept in mind — if I just want to browse a forum or Reddit and see what I come across, for example. Old habits die hard, too, and I’m still not quite over the muscle memory of pulling up a browser and heading to Google.
But one thing that should make that easier is the ChatGPT app’s built-in macOS keyboard shortcut: just press Option-Space on your Mac to bring up a small input box for messaging ChatGPT. It’s reminiscent of the macOS Spotlight feature, both in its appearance and the shortcut you use to summon it (Spotlight uses Command-Space), and with ChatGPT at my fingertips, I’m hoping it’ll become my go-to way to find the answers I need.
A new internet era
The more time I spend using ChatGPT on my Mac, the more I feel it’s the ideal solution for my Google frustrations. Given how capable ChatGPT is and how differently it does things — instead of throwing random websites at you and leaving you to comb through the debris, it simply tells you what you need to know — I can see myself reaching for it much more readily than Google.
Just as on-demand streaming services make much more sense to me than having to make do with whatever a TV channel’s schedule-maker decides is worth watching, so too does ChatGPT’s answer engine make far more sense to me than a cumbersome and inaccurate search engine like Google. Both sum up information found elsewhere, and neither really “knows” anything inherently. But ChatGPT is tailored to what I actually want, not to someone else’s idea of what I want.
And with the seamless integration into macOS, it’s not longer something I have to go out of my way to seek out. That convenience is key to seeing AI make a tangible improvement on my work and life without requiring too much effort. The best part? With Apple Intelligence rolling out more features over the coming months, it’s only the beginning.
