One more link from OpenAI’s Help Center, this one explaining how to upgrade from the old Mac app to the new “super” app version:
Follow the prompt in the app to download the new ChatGPT desktop app. Then sign in with the same ChatGPT account.
The new app may install alongside your current app. If both remain installed, you will see:
ChatGPT: The new app with Chat, Work, and Codex.ChatGPT Classic: The previous ChatGPT desktop app. You can continue using it; no migration is required at launch. It continues to receive model updates, bug fixes, security patches, and support for its existing Enterprise capabilities. New agent features may be available only in the new app.
None of this has been my experience. I had the existing old ChatGPT app installed on three different Macs. On all three of them, the built-in “Check for Updates” command only installs the latest version of the classic app. This is good, I suppose. But if you’re not aware from following the news that OpenAI released an altogether new “super” app for MacOS and Windows, you’d never know it from the Check for Updates command built into the classic Mac app.
So I don’t see “the prompt in the app to download the new ChatGPT desktop app”. If I download the new app manually, I get a disk image. After mounting the disk image, the instructions say to double-click the “ChatGPT” app on the disk image — not to drag it to the Applications folder. If I do that while the old ChatGPT app is still running, it bounces back and forth a few times but nothing new gets installed and nothing old gets removed or renamed. I’m just left with the classic ChatGPT app, still named “ChatGPT”.
If I run the installer on the disk image when the old ChatGPT app is not running, the old app gets replaced by the new one in my Applications folder, and the old app is moved to the Trash. There is no app named “ChatGPT Classic”. I mean, their Help document does say “the new app may install alongside your current app”, and “if both remained installed”, so they seem just as confused as I am. And while you can, for now at least, just remain on the old version of the app and still get model updates and bug fixes, there is seemingly no way to download a new copy of the classic ChatGPT Mac app if you don’t already have a copy.
This is an app with over a billion users. I know there aren’t a billion users of the native Mac app, but, still. It’s one of the most popular apps any company has ever made.