Beam pulls single app windows off the Mac Mini running your agents
The New Stack Matthew Burns ● Covered by 2 sources
Beam lets you pull one app window from a Mac onto another Mac. It’s built for headless Mac Minis running AI agents, so you skip the whole remote desktop mess.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Matthew Burns — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Beam is a new Mac app with a very specific trick: it takes a single window from one Mac and makes it appear on another Mac as if it were local. That matters because the target machine, in this case, is often a headless Mac Mini doing background work for AI agents while nobody is sitting in front of it.
The app comes from serial founder Hiten Shah, who co-founded Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, and Sam Asante. They built it under a company called Noats, and launched it on Product Hunt on Tuesday. Shah says the product is aimed at the setup he sees around agentic workloads: a Mac Mini in a closet, still running models and tasks long after the desk has gone quiet.
Beam’s pitch is to replace the usual Screen Sharing routine with something much narrower. Instead of opening a second desktop and hunting around, a user picks one window — a Terminal session, a browser tab an agent is using, whatever matters — and that window opens on the local Mac with its own Dock icon and Command+Tab entry. Resizing it changes the window on the other machine. Keyboard shortcuts work. Files can be dragged across. Audio can play locally. And if one window still isn’t enough, Beam can bring over a full display or the entire Mac.
The plumbing is set up for Macs only. Both machines need Apple Silicon, macOS Sonoma or later, and Beam installed. They can find each other on the same Wi-Fi network or through Tailscale, and the company says windows, keystrokes, clipboard, and audio move directly between Macs, encrypted, without passing through Beam’s servers. Hidden windows and password managers are excluded from the picker. For people without Beam, a share link can open a single window in any browser, view-only unless control is granted, and the link expires after anywhere from an hour to a week.
Pricing is split by use case. Hosting a Mac and joining a share link are free. Using your own Mac is free for 20 minutes a day, then costs $12 a month, $84 a year, or $199 for a lifetime license. Asante also said native iOS and Android apps are coming.
Beam is arriving in a very specific moment. The Mac Mini is turning into the default home for always-on agents, first pushed by OpenClaw and later followed by others like Perplexity. Apple even credited agentic workloads on its April earnings call. Beam isn’t the first tool to chase this problem — Astropad’s Workbench, Jump Desktop, Screens, and Apple’s own Screen Sharing all cover parts of it — but it makes a clean argument that the real unit of remote access is the window, not the screen.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right kind of boring product: narrow, useful, and built for the weird new habit of letting Macs babysit agents in closets. The broader lesson is that AI infrastructure keeps creating tiny interface problems that feel too small for big platforms and too real for users. Those are often the best startup targets, which is mildly annoying for anyone hoping the future would be simpler.
Read more about this at: The New Stack
