Meet Eney: MacPaw’s Proactive AI Assistant for Your Mac and iPhone
Most AI assistants wait for you to open a chat window, type a request, and spell out exactly what you want. Eney, the new assistant MacPaw launched on October 15, 2026, is built to work the other way around: it watches the context of your Mac — the apps you’re in, the files on your disk, the meetings on your calendar — and spots what needs attention before you ask. Then it prepares the next step and puts it in front of you.
If the name sounds familiar, there’s a reason. MacPaw — the company behind CleanMyMac and Setapp — has been working on Eney since 2019, when it started life as a way to drive CleanMyMac with plain-English commands. The LLM boom and then the agentic-AI boom reshaped it along the way. What finally shipped this week is a Mac-first (and iPhone) assistant that tries to be genuinely helpful without taking the wheel. Here’s what it actually does.
The headline idea: proactive, not autonomous
The pitch MacPaw keeps repeating is “proactive, never autonomous,” and it’s the most important thing to understand about Eney. It will notice that a call is about to start, that a long thread needs a summary, or that your disk is running low — and it will prepare the next move. But by default it asks before it sends a message, changes a calendar event, or moves a file, and you decide how much freedom to give it.
That’s a deliberate answer to a real anxiety. Plenty of people are wary of handing an AI the keys to their inbox and calendar — and even daily AI users say they feel some dread about it. An assistant that defaults to asking, with an autonomy dial you control, is a sensible way to earn trust one approval at a time rather than demanding it up front.
Eney Wand: point at the screen instead of copy-pasting
The feature most likely to win people over is the Eney Wand. Shake your cursor over a block of text and the Wand pops up, letting you select that text and ask Eney about it right there. You can also trigger it with Option + W, or double-tap the Option key to summon Eney from anywhere.
It sounds small, but it solves the single most tedious habit of using AI tools: constantly copying content out of one app, pasting it into a chat window, then pasting the answer back. Because Eney is wired into the system, you just point at what’s on screen — an email, a paragraph, an error message — and work with it in place. No window-juggling.
Mnemos: a memory that’s meant to stay on your Mac
Eney remembers you through Mnemos, MacPaw’s memory system. Instead of a flat list of “facts,” Mnemos uses a knowledge graph that links people, projects, preferences, and events — and it tracks how those change over time. Correct something or let a stale fact expire, and it updates rather than clinging to the old version.
Two details matter here. First, privacy: Mnemos is designed to store and process memories locally on the Mac, and it distinguishes between what you explicitly told it, what it pulled from connected sources, and what it merely inferred from past behavior. That provenance tracking is smart — it’s the kind of thing that keeps an assistant from treating a guess as gospel. If you care about where your AI history lives, it pairs naturally with good habits like being careful that your AI chats don’t quietly end up public. Second, it’s early: MacPaw says Mnemos is still in development, and for now it only manages Eney’s own memories rather than reaching into your other apps. Handily, Eney can import your ChatGPT archive, so you can carry existing context over on day one.
Skills and everyday writing help
Eney ships with a set of ready-made Skills for routine chores — planning your day, reviewing your week, catching up on the news, or tidying a clogged Downloads folder — so you’re not building workflows from scratch. If you’ve seen Google’s always-on Gemini Spark agent, the ambition is similar; the difference is that Eney leans on its deep hooks into macOS and keeps you in the approval loop.
There’s also Eney Spell, a writing helper that fixes spelling, grammar, and wording directly inside Mail, Slack, Notes, or your browser — again without bouncing text into a separate app. It’s the kind of quiet, everyday utility that tends to get used far more than the flashy demos.
Local and cloud models under the hood
Eney runs on a mix of local and cloud AI models. MacPaw partnered with Liquid AI to build custom models tuned to run efficiently on Apple hardware, so a lot of the lighter work can happen on-device — faster, and with less of your data leaving the machine. More demanding jobs still reach out to the cloud.
That hybrid design is increasingly the sensible pattern, and it echoes a point worth remembering whenever you use AI: the biggest, cloud-heavy model isn’t always the right tool. Often the cheaper, faster, local model is the smarter pick for simple tasks — and Eney doing routine chores on-device is exactly that principle in action.
Is it worth a look?
If you live on a Mac, Eney is one of the more thoughtful takes on the “AI that acts” trend. The system-wide Wand genuinely removes friction, the ask-first default respects your control, and an on-device memory is a real privacy point of difference. The honest caveats: Mnemos is still maturing, some capabilities are limited at launch, and — as with any assistant that can touch your apps — you’ll want to watch what it does before you loosen the leash.
Start the way you would with any new assistant, human or AI: give it one small, low-stakes job, approve its steps, and see whether it actually saves you time. The best tools don’t demand your trust on day one — they earn it. Point Eney at a cluttered Downloads folder or a week that needs planning, and let it show you what it can do.
Sources & further reading:
- MacPaw launches Eney, a proactive AI assistant for Mac and iPhone — 9to5Mac
- MacPaw Launches Eney, a Proactive AI Assistant for Mac — MacPaw
- MacPaw’s Eney is an AI agent that prepares and plans your chores on iPhone and Mac — Digital Trends
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