It’s a long time since anyone called Apple “beleaguered.” That word followed the company like a shadow through the late 1990s. Now Apple Silicon machines are the default launch platform for the most significant AI tools being built.
In the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic released major agentic desktop apps exclusively on macOS. Not Windows. Not Linux. Mac only.
OpenAI’s Codex app is a command centre for AI coding agents. Run multiple agents in parallel across your codebase, review diffs in-thread, schedule automations and let agents work in isolated worktrees so they don’t step on each other. Over a million developers have used Codex since launch.
Claude Cowork takes a different angle. Where Codex targets developers, Cowork is for everyone. Point it at a folder, describe what you want done and Claude plans and executes the work: sorting files, building spreadsheets, drafting reports. You come back to finished output.
Both are Mac-only for the same reasons. A disproportionate share of developers and knowledge workers use Macs. Apple Silicon gives both companies a single, consistent hardware target for performance and sandboxing. And because these tools are agentic, meaning they read, create and modify your actual files, the security model matters enormously. Building on Apple’s virtualisation stack first is the sensible engineering call.
Windows is coming. OpenAI offers a waitlist for Windows and Linux. Anthropic is targeting mid-2026 for Windows. But Mac users get a meaningful head start.
The pattern is clear: when AI companies need a controlled, high-density platform to ship v1 of their most ambitious tools, they reach for macOS. From beleaguered to the launchpad for AI’s next wave. That’s quite the arc.
If you’re on a Mac, start experimenting now. The muscle memory of working with agentic AI tools is worth building early.