As is made obvious in this demo, this is how the API serving a specific Chinese open-weight model works. What happens when you serve it on your own infrastructure?
Many even prefer email or similar clients to be desktop apps. This seems like an important part of the conversation that is being left out: the more complex the task that the app is handling, and the more memory-intensive, the better fit it is for a desktop app.
That said, as web browsers get better at memory management and safe hardware access (e.g. WebGL / WebGPU) I expect this list of tools that "must" be thick to dwindle.
Used it for so many years, just last year I switched to the 12 mini. The form factor was my primary decision in using the SE, and when my last one broke I decided that the relative improvement in battery life was worth trading to a larger phone. I'm happy enough but if they make a phone the size of the SE again I'll switch in a heartbeat, and I would not be sad if I had to "down"grade again in the meantime.
I wrote a very simple script to automatically download desktop wallpapers from http://simpledesktops.com/. I then cron'd it to place wallpapers in a folder, and Mac OS automatically rotates through the wallpapers randomly every hour. I love the idea of small, simple projects that make your life better.
1. Running todo list or quick combo-list of todo's for a specific project.
This is basically throw-away but has some historical interest in that it can be fun to flip back to todo list pages and see what a previous week looked like, in general. There is also interesting signal in the notes itself ... for instance, the more stressed I am, the large and more illegible my handwriting grows.
2. Notes taken on paper from a meeting or class or lesson.
These are often taken on paper for a specific reason (for one thing, when I talk to clients in person, I hate to have a laptop in front of me, even though I could type much quicker than I can write.) These notes I will generally photograph with my smartphone and upload directly to an online note taking system (Evernote has gotten a lot better again recently). I find that Evernote and presumably several other note taking systems are actually pretty good at basic OCR / I can generally search text that is written legibly on these notes. If I add some basic tags or other information to the note after it is uploaded, this pretty much fulfills my needs to be able to interact with the note digitally after the fact.
Not to mention what happens when the power goes out, even momentarily. On Friday afternoon I lost power an hour before leaving for the airport. I was reasonably sure I could remember the light switch position to ensure lights were off, but the digital (non-networked) thermostat booted up when the power came back and has been heating my empty apartment all weekend long.