If you’re heavily invested in Apple apps (iMessage/Calendar/Reminders/Notes), you need a Mac to give the agent tools to interact with these apps. I think that combined with the form factor, price, and power consumption, makes it an ideal candidate.
If you’re heavily invested in Windows, then you’d probably go for a small x86 PC.
Some of those connectors are only available on the mac and some only on the iPhone. Like notes is available on the mac, but not on the phone. Vice versa for reminders.
Can you imagine giving an AI access to your messages, notes and calendar though?
I use agentic coding, this is next level madness.
I used Claude Code (CC) to make my own MCPs for these apps. I gave it read/write access only, no ability to delete. Of course it could probably code it's way into doing that since it can access the MCP code. I don't run it in --yolo mode though.
I interact only with CC on the machine and watch what its doing, I haven't tried OpenClaw yet.
Here's some workflows I've personally found valuable:
- I have it read the "Grocery" Reminders list and find things I commonly buy every week and pre-populate the grocery list as a starting point. It only adds items that I haven't already added via Siri as the week goes on. For example, I might notice I've run out of cheese and I'll say "Hey Siri, add cheese to grocery list". The list is shared via iCloud Reminders app between my spouse and I.
- Pre-CC, I wrote an OR-Tools python tool for "solving" the parenting time calendar. My ex and I work inconsistent schedules each month. Each month I was manually creating a calendar honoring requests, hard constraints, and attempting to balance custody 50/50. CC uses the MCPs to fetch the calendar events and review emails related to planning. It then structures everything as JSON as inputs to the optimizer. The optimizer runs with these inputs and spits out a few "solutions". I review the candidate solutions and select one. CC uses the MCP to add the solution to the calendar. This one saves me probably an hour every month.
- CC uses an email MCP to fetch emails from my child's school and suggest events its found in the emails to add to the calendar.
None of these are huge time savings on their own but the accumulation of reducing the time to complete these repetitive tasks has been awesome in my opinion. These are all things that most definitely would not have been worth automating with traditional dev work but since I can just dictate to CC for a few seconds and it has something that works a few minutes later it's become worthwhile.
I guess what’s wrong with it? Let’s say it has read only access, new messages and calendar invites need approval. I’m not sure I understand the harm? I suppose data exfiltration, but like you could start with an allowlist approach. So the first few uses and reads take a while with allowing the ai to read stuff , but it doesn’t seem that crazy given it’s what we basically do with ai coding tools?
I think (most of) them register new accounts for the agent.