Products with a Soul: What Mac AI Apps Can Learn from Granola

Most AI apps today don’t feel broken.
They feel assembled.

A prompt box here. A “magic” button there. Whatever the latest model can do, bolted on as quickly as possible. The result often works — but it doesn’t feel like anything. There’s no consistent voice, no sense of intention, no personality you can learn to trust.

Following our Granola review, and after watching Christopher Pedregal’s talk “How to Build a Product that Hits PMF on Day 1“, one idea kept resurfacing: great products don’t feel like feature sets. They feel like people you’ve come to know.

When software can’t decide who it is

Granola’s founders often describe a good product as behaving like a familiar person. You can anticipate how it will react, how it will look, and what it values. When that expectation breaks — when a product feels thoughtful in one moment and oddly aggressive in the next — trust collapses.

On the Mac, this kind of inconsistency is especially visible.

You can often see the org chart in the UI:

• One screen optimized for growth
• Another clearly owned by infrastructure
• A settings pane that feels like legal snuck it in at the last minute

Nothing is obviously wrong, but nothing feels aligned either.

A product with a soul does the opposite. Every surface reflects a small set of deeply held values: how much it respects your time, how it treats your attention, and how much control it gives you.

Granola is a rare AI app that passes this test.

Why Mac users notice “soul” more than anyone else

Mac users don’t evaluate software one feature at a time. They judge it as a whole.

Keyboard shortcuts, menu bar behavior, typography, latency, defaults — these details quietly add up to a feeling of coherence or friction. That’s why so many AI tools feel slightly off on macOS. They function, but they don’t belong.

Granola feels native not because it looks like Apple Notes, but because it behaves like a good Mac app: calm, opinionated, and respectful of the user’s flow. It doesn’t constantly remind you that it’s powered by AI. It assumes you’ll notice.

That restraint is part of its personality.

The real insight: AI as editor, not protagonist

Granola’s most important idea isn’t transcription or summarization. Those are table stakes now.

The deeper insight is role clarity.

Granola assumes that humans are responsible for intent, judgment, and rough thinking. AI is responsible for memory, structure, and polish. During meetings, the app stays out of the way. Afterward, it turns your messy notes into something clearer — you, but edited.

You’re never replaced. You’re amplified.

This choice shapes the entire product. It explains why Granola feels trustworthy instead of merely “magical”, and why users remain in control rather than becoming spectators to an automated workflow.

That’s what gives the product its soul.

Coherence is a design choice, not a byproduct

In the PMF talk, what stood out wasn’t speed or clever growth tactics, but how much effort went into subtraction. Granola only feels inevitable because so much was removed before users ever saw it.

That kind of restraint is rare, especially in AI products, where capability expansion is seductive and demos reward novelty over clarity. But coherence doesn’t come from adding more intelligence. It comes from deciding what kind of product you’re willing to be — and refusing to drift.

Many Mac AI apps struggle here. In trying to be helpful, they become noisy. In trying to be powerful, they lose their voice. The result is software that can do many things but feels like no one in particular.

Soul as the last real differentiator

As AI models converge, capability differences matter less. Everyone will have access to similar intelligence. What won’t be shared is judgment.

Products with a soul feel predictable without being boring. They have opinions. They respect boundaries. They make users feel smarter rather than managed.

Granola won’t be the last AI app to take this approach. But right now, it’s one of the clearest examples of what a Mac‑first, AI‑native product with a coherent soul can look like.

In a world full of feature salads, that kind of clarity is still rare — and deeply felt.

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