Rewind AI

Rewind continuously captured your screen at low frame rates, audio from meetings and videos (when you opted in per app), and everything you typed or saw on your Mac. It used OCR to make all on-screen text searchable, even from apps that do not expose text programmatically. The result was a searchable database of your entire digital life, what you read, what you wrote, what you watched, who you talked to. You could search by keywords, natural language, or scroll through a visual timeline. Recording was disabled for good on 19 December 2025.

Yes, by default. Rewind stored all data on your Mac's local disk using encrypted storage. The company could not see your recordings or read your history. When you used AI search features, Rewind sent only the specific context needed for the query to a cloud LLM (unless you configured it otherwise). This is a meaningfully stronger privacy posture than cloud-based alternatives like Limitless, which store data on company servers. Local-first is a trade-off: better privacy, but if your Mac dies, your memory dies with it unless you backup.

Rewind used aggressive compression, typically around 50-100 GB per year of continuous recording for most users. This was less than it sounds because Rewind stored low-frame-rate screen captures rather than full video, and audio was compressed. Most modern Macs with 512 GB+ storage could comfortably hold a year or two of Rewind data. The Pro plan optimized compression further, and you could set retention policies to automatically delete old data.

Not any more, because it can no longer be bought: recording in the Rewind app was disabled for good on 19 December 2025 and downloads were removed. Historically, for Mac power users, founders, consultants, and researchers who relied on their computer as their primary tool, Rewind often paid for itself within weeks. The ability to find any document, message, or conversation from months ago saved hours of searching, time that normally disappears into digital archaeology. For casual users who forgot a few things occasionally, the free tier or a note-taking habit was probably enough. For anyone whose job was information-dense, Rewind was one of the best productivity tools in the 2020s.

This comparison is historical. The company rebranded from Rewind to Limitless (limitless.ai), Meta then acquired Limitless, the team joined Meta, and the standalone products began winding down. Rewind captured your computer, while Limitless extended capture to the physical world via the optional Pendant. For Mac users who primarily lived in front of a laptop, Rewind was more complete, it recorded everything on screen, not just meetings. For people whose important conversations happened in person, in cars, or over phone calls, the Limitless Pendant covered what Rewind could not reach. Some users ran both: Rewind for computer memory, Limitless for offline memory.

No. Rewind was macOS-only, and it has since been discontinued: recording was disabled for good on 19 December 2025. The core recording technology relied on macOS APIs for low-overhead screen and audio capture that Windows and mobile do not expose the same way. The company did not publicly commit to Windows or mobile versions before the wind-down. Windows users interested in similar capabilities have no direct equivalent yet, the best alternative is Microsoft Recall on Copilot+ PCs, though it has different privacy characteristics.