Hearthside

Remote workers and graduate students spending long solo days on a Mac who want it to feel less sterile

• Menu-bar mascot that reacts to typing rhythm and app-switching patterns
• Time-of-day micro-moments library — poem, breath, joke, all customizable
• Meeting-fatigue detector that triggers after 90 min of back-to-back video calls
• End-of-day 'what you did' journal card auto-drafted from local signals

Pulse Island and the 'alive desktop' wave show consumers want ambient, low-effort companions; cheap LLM inference now makes continuous low-token output economically viable.