Allen Pike, Back in November: ‘Why Is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?’

Allen Pike, back in November (and corresponding Hacker News thread):

Still, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a change in course here. While mobile is king, desktop is still where work happens. While OpenAI has acquired Sky to double down on desktop, Google has long been all-in on the browser. That leaves Anthropic as the challenger on desktop, with their latest models begging to be paired with well-crafted apps.

A few months ago Google launched a native Gemini app for the Mac. A month ago I wrote about why it’s not that great, and annoyingly presumptuous. Almost all good Mac apps are native; not all native Mac apps are good.

What keeps me using ChatGPT and keeps me away from using Claude is not that ChatGPT happens to be written using native APIs like AppKit. It’s that it looks and feels like a Mac app — you know, with a Settings window that is ... a window. And even more so, with very cool features like its ability to attach a chat to an open document in BBEdit or Notes. When ChatGPT is attached to an open document in another app, it’s not a snapshot at the moment of attachment, like what you’d get by copying and pasting the whole thing into the chat, or by dragging the current version of the file into the chat. It’s a live ongoing attachment, so as the attached document/note changes, ChatGPT sees the changes. It’s such a great feature, and I don’t think it exists on any platform but the Mac. And it couldn’t exist on iOS, which, because of its kindergarten-safety-scissors design, doesn’t allow for inter-application communication.

I worry for ChatGPT’s future, though.

While Anthropic could surprise everybody by dropping a native Mac app, I would bet against that. There’s a lot of headroom available to them just by investing in doing Electron well, mixing in bits of native code where needed, and hill-climbing from “website in shell” to “great app that happens to use web technology”.

Just as ChatGPT’s unexpected success woke OpenAI to the opportunities of being more product-centric, the breakout hit of Claude Code might warm Anthropic to the importance of investing in delightful tools. Last year they brought on Mike Krieger as CPO, who certainly seems like he could rally a team in this direction given the chance.

I don’t know what Krieger is doing there, but it sure doesn’t seem like he’s focused on creating delightful tools.

See Also: In December 2024 Allen Pike was my guest on The Talk Show, for an episode largely focused on AI.

Update: I was correct — Krieger is still at Anthropic but at the start of this year he left his role as chief product officer to head up their “Labs” team, where they’re building new product experiments. Krieger spoke about the role shift briefly during an interview last week at the “AI Engineer World’s Fair” conference.

★ Monday, 6 July 2026