Memory · ChatGPT for Mac
ChatGPT starts remembering
what you did, not what your screen looked like.
Re-explaining your work context at the start of every conversation is a small tax that adds up. The ChatGPT Mac app's new "Computer History" feature turns clicks and app switches into memory it can pull into later chats. It's opt-in, but how the stored data is handled still needs care.
From the "Chronicle" preview
to a shipped feature
ChatGPT's macOS app has added "Computer History," which turns your activity across Mac apps and websites into memory. 9to5Mac reported it on August 13, and it replaces the earlier "Chronicle" preview. The mechanics are documented in the official Computer History page on ChatGPT Learn: where Chronicle worked from screenshots of your screen, Computer History is built to record only interaction events — clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, and app switches — exposed through macOS's accessibility features.
It's available to Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, and it's off by default across all three. Pro users can opt in from settings, and initial availability excludes the EEA, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Exclusions can be set at the app or site level, you can pause collection from the menu bar at any time, and you can clear the last 10 minutes, hour, day, or all of it. Keeping that level of user control front and center while still defaulting to opt-in looks like a direct lesson learned from the Chronicle era.
You decide how long
the data lives
Chronicle to Computer History
| Chronicle (old preview) | Computer History (new feature) |
|---|---|
| Stored screenshots of the screen | Records interaction events (clicks, typing) only |
| Preview-only, narrow availability | Shipped broadly to Pro/Business/Enterprise |
| Limited per-app exclusion controls | Fine-grained exclusion by app and site |
What it remembers isn't your screen —
it's what you did.
Who it helps, and how
Engineers and PMs who bounce between multiple apps on a Mac all day while using ChatGPT are the ones most likely to feel the difference — a follow-up conversation can pick up from yesterday's research or a Slack thread without re-explaining anything. Marketers juggling dashboards across several campaigns get the same benefit when brainstorming against numbers they were just looking at. If you don't bounce between apps constantly, or you deliberately leave it off for privacy reasons, you won't notice much change either way.
The benefit is largest for work that involves frequent context-switching across parallel projects. If mornings are spent on code review and afternoons on deck-building, carrying over recent activity means you don't re-explain your situation from scratch every time. If your work is more single-task and sustained, the payoff is more modest.
The flip side of
being remembered
According to 9to5Mac's reporting, the memory files Computer History generates aren't encrypted at rest on the device, and other programs running under the same macOS user account could potentially read them. OpenAI's own guidance is to secure the Mac account itself and exclude sensitive apps and sites from history. If you turn it on, it's worth spending a minute up front excluding things like your password manager or health and finance apps before you start using it day to day.
If you're on a shared Mac or a family login, it's worth confirming you're actually running under your own dedicated user account before turning this on at all. The lack of at-rest encryption is a design constraint worth weighing on its own, separate from the feature's convenience — and it may be part of why the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK were left out of the initial rollout.