// 9TO5MAC — MOBILE & WEB
MacPaw launches Eney, a proactive AI assistant for Mac and iPhone
Today marks a milestone for MacPaw, as the company is releasing Eney, a proactive AI assistant that works across your apps, files, and system to help you get things done, following a development process that began back in 2019. Here are the details.
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to talk to Oleksandr Kosovan, founder and CEO of MacPaw, as he showed me Eney, the company’s Mac-first proactive AI assistant.
Eney isn’t a new idea. In fact, we have written about it on 9to5Mac a few times. However, as the underlying AI technology kept changing and evolving, Eney changed and evolved with it.
As Kosovan explained, Eney originated back in 2019 as an idea for simplifying MacPaw’s CleanMyMac through natural-language commands. Then came the LLM boom, which in turn gave way to the agentic AI boom.
More recently, local AI models have become powerful enough to handle increasingly complex tasks that, until not long ago, required much larger cloud-based models.
So, MacPaw kept reworking and refining Eney, which finally launches today for Mac and iPhone.
Unlike other AI assistants Eney is built for the Mac: it understands the context of the machine itself — the apps you work across, the files on your disk, the meetings on your calendar — and spots what needs attention before you do. A call about to start. A meeting that needs a summary. A disk running out of space. Eney notices, prepares the next step, and puts it in front of you for approval, without the need to switch between multiple apps, tools and products.
The very first thing I noticed about Eney was MacPaw’s clever gesture to invoke it through the Eney Wand command. Just shake your cursor over some text, and Eney Wand activates, allowing you to select that text and prompt Eney about it. You can also invoke Eney Wand with the Option + W shortcut, or double-tap the Option key to bring up Eney from anywhere.
The Eney Wand is a particularly clever feature, as it solves one of the main pain points I have with most AI tools: constantly having to copy and paste content in and out of a chat window to get help with whatever I’m working on. Instead, Eney’s system-wide integration lets me simply point to something on my screen and ask the assistant to work with it, without having to move anything between apps.
Eney relies on both local and cloud-based AI models, with MacPaw working alongside Liquid AI to develop custom models optimized for Apple hardware. I recently had the opportunity to visit Liquid AI’s San Francisco headquarters, and it was really impressive to see how the company is bringing advanced AI capabilities to devices that weren’t originally designed to run them. (Not that the Mac isn’t, but you get what I mean, right?)