Why Is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?

Summary

Claude, Copilot, and making a good desktop app. This year, even as Anthropic, Google, and others have challenged OpenAI’s model performance crown, ChatGPT’s lead as an end-user product has only solidified. On the Dithering podcast last week (paywalled), Ben Thompson called out an aspect of why this is: I need someone to write the definitive article on why the ChatGPT Mac app is so good, and why everyone else is in dereliction of duty in doing these. Gemini 3 is reportedly coming this week. […] And I’m looking forward to it. I expect it to be good. And it’s just going to have to be so astronomically good for me to not use ChatGPT, precisely because the [Mac] app is so useful. A model is only as useful as its applications. As AI becomes multimodal and gets better at using tools, these interfaces are getting even more important – to the point that models’ apps now matter more than benchmarks. And while every major LLM has a mobile app, only three have a Mac app: Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT. And of those, only one is truly good. Hold on – we’re diving in. The Apps ChatGPT for Mac is a nice app. It’s well-maintained, stable, performant, and pleasant to use. Over the last year and a half, OpenAI has brought most new ChatGPT features to the Mac app on day one, and even launched new capabilities exclusively for Mac, like Work with Apps. The app does a good job of following the platform conventions on Mac. That means buttons, text fields, and menus behave as they do in other Mac apps. While ChatGPT is imperfect on both Mac and web, both platforms have the finish you would expect from a daily-use tool. ChatGPT for Mac (left) vs. ChatGPT on the web (right). Meanwhile, the Mac apps for Claude and Microsoft’s “365 Copilot” are simply websites residing in an app’s shell, like a digital hermit crab. 365 Copilot is effectively a build of the Edge browser that only loads m365.cloud.microsoft, while Claude loads their web UI using the ubiquitous Electron framework. Claude.app: a web...