Rewind AI

Rewind continuously captures your screen at low frame rates, audio from meetings and videos (when you opt in per app), and everything you type or see on your Mac. It uses OCR to make all on-screen text searchable, even from apps that do not expose text programmatically. The result is a searchable database of your entire digital life — what you read, what you wrote, what you watched, who you talked to. You can search by keywords, natural language, or scroll through a visual timeline.

Yes, by default. Rewind stores all data on your Mac's local disk using encrypted storage. The company cannot see your recordings or read your history. When you use AI search features, Rewind sends only the specific context needed for the query to a cloud LLM (unless you configure 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 uses aggressive compression — typically around 50-100 GB per year of continuous recording for most users. This is less than it sounds because Rewind stores low-frame-rate screen captures rather than full video, and audio is compressed. Most modern Macs with 512 GB+ storage can comfortably hold a year or two of Rewind data. The Pro plan optimizes compression further, and you can set retention policies to automatically delete old data.

For Mac power users, founders, consultants, and researchers who rely on their computer as their primary tool, Rewind often pays for itself within weeks. The ability to find any document, message, or conversation from months ago saves hours of searching — time that normally disappears into digital archaeology. For casual users who forget a few things occasionally, the free tier or a note-taking habit is probably enough. For anyone whose job is information-dense, Rewind is one of the best productivity tools in the 2020s.

Rewind captures your computer, while Limitless extends capture to the physical world via the optional Pendant. For Mac users who primarily live in front of a laptop, Rewind is more complete — it records everything on screen, not just meetings. For people whose important conversations happen in person, in cars, or over phone calls, Limitless Pendant covers what Rewind cannot reach. Some users run both: Rewind for computer memory, Limitless for offline memory.

No. Rewind is macOS-only. The core recording technology relies on macOS APIs for low-overhead screen and audio capture that Windows and mobile do not expose the same way. The company has not publicly committed to Windows or mobile versions. 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.