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 runs its speech model (Parakeet parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 by default) on the Apple Neural Engine, no account, no cloud.
• You prefer a founding-license option for early supporters to a monthly subscription.
• You're on an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14.2 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: Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek founded Rewind AI.
• 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 periodic screenshots of the front window (default every 2 minutes; you can set 30 seconds to 10 minutes), runs OCR on-device, and writes an AI day narrative every 30 minutes by default. Screenshots are kept 30 days by default (7/30/90/Forever options), stored locally in ~/Library/Application Support/HindsightNext/journal. Capture, OCR, search, and storage never touch a network; the day narrative is the only piece that waits for an AI provider you configure yourself.

Rewind recorded everything continuously; Everpaper samples the front window on a schedule with a Pause when idle 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 (Kevin Chen's teardown, NumericCitizen).

Meeting recording → The Minutes

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 (read-only; events never uploaded) with a 5-second cancellable countdown. Where Rewind gave you a transcript after the fact, The Minutes gives you a live panel: speaker-labeled transcript, notes with /decision, /action, /question snippets, and an Ask tab with Catch Up / Capture / Challenge quick prompts. Hit ⇧⌘M to start, ⌘4 to hide any speaker from the transcript.

Transcription → Neural Engine, not the cloud

Rewind did its speech-to-text on-device too, and credit where due: its best architectural decision. Everpaper keeps that lineage: the default Parakeet model (parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3) runs on the Apple Neural Engine, with Whisper and MOSS (transcription + diarization in one model, opt-in, happiest on 16 GB machines) as alternatives. The CLI even transcribes any audio or video file on-device: everpaper-cli transcribe PATH --diarize.

"Ask Rewind" → Ask the Book + Second Brain

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 the Book (⇧⌘A) streams a prose answer only after you configure one, which can be fully local (Ollama, LM Studio, oMLX with Qwen3.5 4B, or Apple Foundation Models) or a cloud provider behind the Allow cloud AI to analyze your journal toggle that ships OFF. Every answer is verified against captured history, with unsupported claims stripped, and each source links back to the exact frame it came from. The 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, Kevin Chen's 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 (notes snippets, Ask over the live transcript, action-item extraction into Today's Focus).
• Founding-license option for early supporters, not a monthly subscription.
• Real limits: macOS 14.2+ 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 Second Brain 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, with a founding-license option for early supporters — not a monthly subscription. 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 14.2 or later and a few GB for the one-time speech-model download. 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 Ollama, oMLX, or Apple Foundation Models 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 front window on a schedule (default every 2 minutes) with OCR, rather than recording continuously. Meetings are recorded fully when you start minutes (⇧⌘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 the Second Brain'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. Join the waitlist at everpaper.app, and read the Day Journal docs to see exactly how the capture model works before you commit.