Thirty-two apps one person actually opens every day

The question this video answers is narrower than its title. A new M2 Mac mini has arrived, and this is what gets installed on it — a reinstall rather than a ranking, which is the more useful artefact of the two, because the apps that survive a reinstall are the ones someone actually opens.

The six groups are areas of work rather than app categories. Productivity, organising life, personal use, research and writing, creative work, business. Grouping by what you are doing rather than by what the app is called is why the same app could plausibly belong in two groups, and why the list reads like a working setup instead of a catalogue.

The unequal lengths are informative too. Productivity gets five apps in under five minutes; research and writing gets six in just over two. The sections that run long are the ones where the apps need explaining, and the ones that run short are the ones where a name is enough.

One caveat that applies to any list this size: the description names three apps explicitly — Superhuman, Rize and SigmaOS — and the rest are only visible on screen. Only Rize has a page on Nuanyue, so this record links one app out of thirty-two, which is an accurate measure of how much of the list can be checked without watching it.