Agentic AI Goes Retro
MacinAI brings vintage Macintosh computers into the modern age of AI with a chat interface and agentic control over local apps.
If you have been holding off on making a new purchase on computing hardware to get the most out of your current gear — like for maybe 30 years or so — and were thinking about finally upgrading to make the most of modern advances in AI, you can put your wallet back away. YouTuber SDogAlex has just released an application for the Macintosh Color Classic called MacinAI. Popping the MacinAI floppy disk into your drive will bring you into the modern era… sort of.
The vintage computer runs a client that interacts with a modern machine on the same local network. This modern machine interacts with a ChatGPT model via a Python script that makes API requests. In this way, MacinAI can be used as a chat interface — but that is not all it can do.
MacinAI also indexes the Macintosh Color Classic to determine, for instance, which applications it has available to it. This information is provided to ChatGPT so that it can suggest, and even launch (with the cooperation of MacinAI) local software. In this way, SDogAlex has enabled agentic AI on vintage Macintosh hardware.
You can download MacinAI for yourself from Old Apple Stuff. In the future, SDogAlex plans to support more AI models, including Claude, Gemini, and Grok. More advanced system actions, like reading and writing files, may also be coming soon.