Rewind vs Everpaper: an honest 2026 migration guide

Rewind is gone, so this page is less a head-to-head and more an obituary plus a migration map. Quick disclosure up front: Everpaper is our product, so read our claims about it with that in mind. We'll be as fair to Rewind's memory as we are to its successor options. Rewind genuinely pioneered the on-device personal-memory category, and it deserves an accurate send-off.

Quick verdict#

Choose Limitless if…

• You already own the Pendant or have a Limitless account and want the free Unlimited-plan wind-down through 2026 (existing customers pay nothing; support committed "throughout 2026," checked 2026-08-04).
• You mainly want cloud transcription of in-person conversations and accept Meta ownership of that pipeline.
• You don't need a Mac screen recorder (desktop and web recording is already disabled there).

Choose Everpaper if…

• You want the screen-and-meeting capture model Rewind's Mac app offered, from a product that is still in active development.
• You want transcription to stay on your Mac: Everpaper's speech models (Parakeet parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 and Nemotron by default) run on-device, no account, no cloud.
• You're on an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later (that's a hard requirement; more honest limits below).

What happened to Rewind: the timeline#

Every date below is sourced in our research notes and checked 2026-08-04.

• 2020: Rewind AI is founded.
• November 2022: Rewind for Mac launches: continuous, compressed, on-device recording of screen and audio on Apple Silicon Macs.
• March 2023: "Ask Rewind" goes viral: GPT-4 chat over your own captured history, "ChatGPT for me."
• May 2023: $15M raise at a $350M valuation (NEA, a16z); total funding eventually topped $33M (Sacra).
• Late 2023: Pendant wearable announced; the pivot away from pure Mac software begins.
• April 2024: The Limitless Pendant ships (TechCrunch).
• 2024: Rewind rebrands to Limitless. The Mac app enters maintenance mode.
• December 5, 2025: Meta acquires Limitless (TechCrunch, 9to5Mac).
• December 19, 2025: The Rewind Mac app's recording is disabled and downloads are pulled. Rewind, as a product, is dead.
• 2026: The rewind.ai domain now belongs to an unaffiliated third party running a generic "400+ free AI tools" aggregator. The site itself states it has "no affiliation to the original Rewind AI, Limitless, or Meta" (checked 2026-08-04).

If you Google "Rewind" today and land on rewind.ai, you are not looking at the company that made the app you remember. Be careful entering an email or downloading anything there.

What Rewind users actually lost#

Rewind's pitch was singular: record everything you see, say, and hear on your Mac, compress it roughly 3,750x, keep it local, search it later. The December 2025 shutdown took away:

• Continuous screen + audio capture with on-device OCR and speech-to-text, the core loop. Nothing from the Limitless side replaces it; Limitless's desktop and web recording was disabled after the acquisition.
• Bot-free meeting capture. Rewind captured system audio without putting a bot in the participant list (UCStrategies).
• The "personal time machine" search that The Sweet Setup praised: scroll back through your day, find the thing on screen at 2:40 pm.
• Ask Rewind, the GPT-4-over-your-life chat.

Where each Rewind feature lives now#

This is the part most "Rewind alternatives" pages get wrong, because they were written when Rewind was alive. Here's the honest 2026 mapping.

On-device screen capture + day record → Everpaper's Day Journal#

The closest living successor to Rewind's core loop is Everpaper's Day Journal. It takes a full-screen screenshot every 2 minutes by default (30 s to 10 min), runs OCR on-device, reviews new activity every 10 minutes, and writes the day up when you stop (or, in Activity only mode, keeps an app-and-window timeline with no screenshots). Screenshots are kept 30 days by default (7/30/90/Forever options), stored locally on your Mac. On a new install, the day's text and written entry expire with the screenshots; to keep them, choose Forever or turn off Also delete their text & recall data. Meetings aren't affected. Capture, OCR, search, and storage never touch a network; the activity reviews and the written day are the only pieces that wait for an AI provider you configure yourself.

Rewind recorded everything continuously; Everpaper samples the screen on a schedule with Pause when you're away on by default (2 minutes) and a Reduce work on battery toggle. That's a deliberate design difference: Rewind's always-on capture cost users 20–40% battery on Apple Silicon laptops, with UCStrategies calling it the worst in the category and one user measuring about 10% per hour (an independent teardown, NumericCitizen).

Meeting recording → Meetings#

Like Rewind, Everpaper never joins your call as a bot. It records microphone and system audio as separate time-aligned tracks, recognizes Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, Around, and Whereby links, and can auto-start from your local calendar (Everpaper only reads it and never uploads events) with a 5-second cancellable countdown. Where Rewind gave you a transcript after the fact, Everpaper gives you a live panel: a speaker-labeled transcript, your notes with an "As we go" digest of topics, decisions and next steps, and an Ask field over what's been said. Hit ⇧⌘M to start. Afterwards, a meeting's Speakers tab (⌘4) can hide your voice or any speaker from that meeting's transcript view; the audio and exports keep everyone.

Transcription → on-device, not the cloud#

Rewind did its speech-to-text on-device too, and credit where due: its best architectural decision. Everpaper keeps that lineage: Parakeet (parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3) writes the words and Nemotron labels speakers by default, Whisper is an option, and Detailed meetings re-listen with MOSS, which transcribes and separates speakers in one pass. The CLI even transcribes any audio or video file on-device: everpaper-cli transcribe PATH --diarize.

"Ask Rewind" → Ask the Book + Memory#

Rewind's GPT-4 chat required the cloud, full stop. Everpaper splits the difference: recall and search work with no provider at all ("No provider, no traffic"), and Ask your memory… (⇧⌘A) streams a prose answer only after you configure one, which can be fully local (Everpaper Native on macOS 27, oMLX, LM Studio or Ollama) or a cloud provider behind the Allow cloud AI to analyze your journal toggle that ships OFF. Each source links back to the exact frame it came from. Memory's Ask tab goes further and removes sentences its sources don't support (the check isn't perfect). Memory (also called Second Brain) goes further than Ask Rewind ever did: beliefs with confidence markers, open loops, and a knowledge graph of people, files, sites, and projects, computed locally, gated behind a readiness period (5 days, 300 frames, 60 distinct things, 3 recurring threads).

The rest of the field#

For the full rundown (ScreenPipe, Backtrack, Limitless, and an honest note on Rewind itself) read our best Rewind alternatives for 2026. That page owns the alternatives intent; we're not duplicating it here.

At a glance#

How we compared#

We wrote this from primary sources: the "what happened to Rewind" statement on the (now third-party) rewind.ai domain, TechCrunch and 9to5Mac acquisition coverage, an independent app teardown, The Sweet Setup's review, and UCStrategies' 2026 retrospective, every claim stamped "checked 2026-08-04." For Everpaper we used our own shipped documentation. Rewind can't be benchmarked anymore; its app no longer records, so this is a migration analysis, not a speed test.

Honest pros and cons#

Rewind, in its prime:

• Genuine on-device capture and indexing before it was fashionable.
• Excellent scroll-back search across everything you'd seen and heard.
• No meeting bot; captured system audio instead.
• Battery drain of 20–40%, punishing free-tier limits (one user calculated ~$1.20 per effective search), inconsistent transcription, and, fatally, a subscription to a company that sold itself to Meta and switched the product off with two weeks' notice.

Everpaper, today:

• On-device by default, with no account.
• On-device transcription with speaker labels; live meeting tools Rewind never had (an "As we go" digest beneath your notes, Ask over the live transcript, and action items sent to Today's focus).
• Real limits: macOS 15+ and Apple Silicon only (Intel Macs are out, and there's no iOS, Windows, or web version), private beta with limited spots, AI features that wait for a provider, and a Memory readiness gate of 5 days, 300 frames, 60 distinct things, and 3 recurring threads.

Pricing#

Rewind's old subscription prices varied over the product's life, and there is no current plan or 12-month total to compare: the product is discontinued.

Everpaper is in private beta with limited spots. No public price is available, so we won't invent a numerical comparison.

Migration notes for ex-Rewind users#

1. Export anything Rewind still lets you reach. If your local Rewind database is intact, copy it somewhere safe now; the app no longer records, and there's no official migration path to anything.
2. Check your hardware. Everpaper needs Apple Silicon on macOS 15 or later and a few GB of free disk space for the speech and AI models. If you're on Intel, neither Rewind's spirit nor Everpaper will run there; ScreenPipe is the usual fallback (see the alternatives list).
3. Expect a lighter capture model. Rewind recorded continuously; Everpaper samples. You'll trade total recall of every pixel for battery life Rewind users only dreamed about.
4. Bring your meetings over. Old .vtt transcripts from Zoom or Teams can be imported as real meetings with Import Transcript, no audio needed, so your archive isn't stranded.
5. Decide your AI posture before you start. Nothing leaves your Mac until you enable a provider. If Rewind's GPT-4 uploads bothered you, pick Everpaper Native, oMLX, LM Studio or Ollama and stay fully local.

FAQ#

Is Rewind coming back? No. The company rebranded to Limitless in 2024, was acquired by Meta (announced December 5, 2025), and disabled the Rewind Mac app's recording on December 19, 2025. Meta absorbed the team for its wearables work; there is no announced plan to revive the Mac product, and rewind.ai is now owned by an unaffiliated third party (checked 2026-08-04).

What replaced Rewind? Officially, nothing. Limitless pivoted to the Pendant, then got acquired. Unofficially, the on-device capture niche Rewind created is now served by Everpaper (commercial, on-device daybook for macOS), ScreenPipe (source-available, more developer-oriented), and Backtrack (meeting-focused). We compare all of them in our Rewind alternatives roundup.

Is rewind.ai safe to use? It's not the company you're thinking of. The domain now hosts a generic AI-tools aggregator that explicitly disclaims any affiliation with the original Rewind AI, Limitless, or Meta (checked 2026-08-04). Treat it as an unrelated website.

Does Everpaper record everything like Rewind did? No, by design. Everpaper's Day Journal screenshots the screen on a schedule (default every 2 minutes) with OCR, rather than recording continuously. Meetings are recorded fully when you start a meeting (⇧⌘M) or via calendar auto-start. The result is far lower battery cost than Rewind's 20–40% drain, at the price of not capturing every single frame.

Can I use Everpaper without any cloud AI? Yes. Capture, OCR, transcription, search, recall cards, and Memory's beliefs and graph all run on-device. "No provider, no traffic." AI writing features (Ask the Book, day narrative, Reflection) wait until you configure a provider, local ones included, and cloud AI stays behind an opt-in toggle that's off by default.

Final recommendation#

Rewind proved the category and then demonstrated its biggest risk: your memory infrastructure is only as stable as the service behind it. If you already have Limitless hardware and an account, ride the free wind-down through 2026. If you want on-device capture, transcription, search, and a second brain on a Mac, compare Everpaper's documented limits with your needs.

Everpaper is in private beta. Apply for the private beta (if you're selected, you'll hear back within 48 hours), and read the Day Journal docs to see exactly how the capture model works before you commit.