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Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
Github: https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel
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- skrun_dev 6mo agoNotes.app handles big notebooks without choking on storage?
- Remi_Etien 6mo ago[flagged]
- p1anecrazy 6mo agoReally like demo cli tools description. Are they limited by the context window as well? What’s your experience with log file sizes?
- franze 6mo agothe 2 hard limits of Appel Intelligence Foundation Model and therefor apfel is the 4k token context window and the super hard guardrails (the model prefers to tell you nothing before it tells you something wrong ie ask it to describe a color) parsing logfiles line by line, sure parsing a whole logfile, well it must be tiny, logfile hardly ever are
- reaperducer 6mo agothe model prefers to tell you nothing before it tells you something wrong If all LLMs did this, people would trust them more.
- khalic 6mo agoAFM models are very impressive, but they’re not made for conversation, so keep your expectations down in chat mode.
- elcritch 6mo agoAny know if these only installed on Tahoe? I'm running Sequoia still and get an error about model not found.
- HelloUsername 6mo ago> Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26 Tahoe or newer, Apple Intelligence enabled
- swiftcoder 6mo agoAnyone tried using this as a sub-agent for a more capable model like Claude/Codex?
- LatencyKills 6mo agoThe combined (input/output) context window length is 4K. Claude would blow through that even when trying to read and summarize a small file.
- knocte 6mo agoWith a small/minimalistic harness like Pi maybe it works well?
- franze 6mo agoproject started with trying to run openclaw with it in ultra token saving mode, did totally not work. great for shell scripts though (my major use case now)
- khalic 6mo agoIf you’re looking into small models for tiny local tasks, you should try Qwen coder 0,5B. It’s more of an experiment, but it can output decent functions given the right context instructions.
- xenophonf 6mo ago> [Qwen coder 0,5B] can output decent functions given the right context instructions Can you share a working example?
- khalic 6mo agoSo… a prompt? I’m not on my laptop but I hooked it to cmp.nvim, gave it a short situational prompt, +- 10 lines, and started typing. Not anywhere near usable but with a little effort you can get something ok for repetitive tasks. Maybe something like spotting one specific code smell pattern. The advantage is the ridiculous T/s you get
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- gigatexal 6mo agoIt’s a very small model but I’ve been playing with it for some time now I’m impressed. Have we been sleeping on Apple’s models? Imagine they baked Qwen 3.5 level stuff into the OS. Wow that’d be cool.
- thenthenthen 6mo agoThe vision models and OCR are SUPER
- bombcar 6mo agoApparently the Overcast guy build a beowulf cluster of Mac minis to use the Apple transcription service. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathangathright_marco-arment-just-announced-on-atp-that-overcast-activity-7440235594577854464-FQhm/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathangathright_marco-arment-...
- gigatexal 6mo agoYeah heard him talk about that. 48 or so 16GB m4 Mac minis. Insane. The Beowulf lives
- xp84 6mo agoThe ATP episode where he talked about this was incredibly fascinating. Marco is such a role model to me - he has a complete immunity to fads and trends, and just does things the way he wants to. He adopts the 'new and cool' things only when they have a real benefit.
- gigatexal 6mo agoI largely subscribe to the use boring tech ethos ... but php? come on man. and yet... successful people have used it to build really successful things: Facebook, Tumblr (I think), the things Marco's been involved with. I just dunno outside of meta should we really be pushing php with all its flaws? or is it still flawed and I need to update my priors?
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- ramon156 6mo agoCool tool but I don't get why these websites make idiotic claims > $0 cost No kidding. Why not just link the GH Github: https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel
- ffsm8 6mo agoHe did? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624647
- brians 6mo agoI’ve seen several projects like this that offer a network server with access to these Apple models. The danger is when they expose that, even on a loop port, to every other application on your system, including the browser. Random webpages are now shipping with JavaScript that will post to that port. Same-origin restrictions will stop data flow back to the webpage, but that doesn’t stop them from issuing commands to make changes. Some such projects use CORS to allow read back as well. I haven’t read Apfel’s code yet, but I’m registering the experiment before performing it.
- robotswantdata 6mo agoKeep seeing similar mistakes with vibe coded AI & MCP projects. Even experienced engineers seem oblivious to this attack vector
- stingraycharles 6mo agoI don’t think many browsers will allow posting to 127.0.0.1 from a random website. What’s the threat model here?
- brians 6mo agoI think any browser will allow it but not allow data read back.
- mememememememo 6mo agoIsn't there a CORS preflight check for this? In most cases. I guess you could fashion an OG form to post form fields. But openai is probably a JSON body only. The default scenario should be secure. If the local site sends permissive CORS headers bets may be off. I would need to check but https->http may be a blocker too even in that case. Unless the attack site is http.
- airza 6mo agoThere is a CORS preflight check for POST requests that don't use form-encoding. It would be somewhat surprising if these weren't using JSON (though it wouldn't be that surprising if they were parsing submitted JSON instead of actually checking the MIME-type which would probably be bad anwyay)
- Oras 6mo agoI like the idea and the clarity to explain the usage, my question would be: what kind of tasks it would be useful for?
- khalic 6mo agoMaking a sentence out of a json
- convexly 6mo agoI like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.
- aswanson 6mo agoThat's the way things have to go. Business risk is too high having everything ran over exposed networks.
- lukewarm707 6mo agowhat i say about this, is that an llm is just a big file, there is nothing 'not private' about it. if you are happy with off-prem then the llm is ok too, if you need on-prem this is when you will need local.
- zahlman 6mo ago> an llm is just a big file, there is nothing 'not private' about it. The private thing is the prompt. But also, a local LLM opens up the possibility of agentic workflows that don't have to touch the Internet.
- lukewarm707 6mo agolocal is best for privacy, but i personally think you don't need to go local. anthropic, google, openai etc, decided that their consumer ai plans would not be private. partly to collect training data, the other half to employ moderators to review user activity for safety. we trust that human moderators will not review and flag our icloud docs, onedrive or gmail, or aggregate such documents into training data for llms. it became the norm that an llm is somehow not private. it became a norm that you can't opt out of training, even on paid plans (see meta and google); or if you can opt out of training, you can't opt out of moderation. cloud models with a zero retention privacy policy are private enough for almost everyone, the subscriptions, google search, ai search engines are either 'buying' your digital life or covering themselves for legal reasons. you can and should have private cloud services, and if legal agreement is not enough, cryptographic attestation is already used in compute, with AWS nitro enclaves and other providers.
- arendtio 6mo agoFor those who don't know, 'Apfel' is the German word for Apple.
- gherkinnn 6mo agoAnd for those who did know that and want to know more, the shift from apple - apfel and water -> wasser happened during the High German consonant shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift
- 3yr-i-frew-up 6mo ago[dead]
- VanTodi 6mo agoJust a small thing about the website: your examples shift all the elements below it on mobile when changing, making it jump randomly when trying to read.
- gherkinnn 6mo agoNow this is a development I like. With the Claude bug, or so it is known, burning through tokens at record speed, I gave alternative models a try and they're mostly ... interchangeable. I don't know how easy switching and low brand loyalty and fast markets will play out. I hope that local LLMs will become very viable very soon.
- naravara 6mo agoYeah I don’t think the models are meaningfully differentiated outside of very specific edge cases. I suspect this was the thinking behind OpenAI and Facebook and all trying to lean hard into presenting their chatbots as friends and romantic partners. If they can’t maintain a technical moat they can try to cultivate an emotional one.
- g-mork 6mo agoSaw a comment here yesterday referencing the Attention Is All You Need paper title in a tongue in cheek way. Kinda fun to imagine the friend/romance angle is just a bunch of socially awkward folk at OpenAI misinterpreting the original paper
- acuozzo 6mo ago> very specific edge cases Mathematics is hardly an edge case, but SOTA models differ wildly in their ability to write proofs for unsolved problems. Models also differ wildly in tasks like decompilation for reverse engineering. Also, so far, the only model I've found which can competently write PTX for SM100 CUDA devices is GPT-5.4pro, but I'm willing to admit that this is more of an edge case than the aforementioned. AFAICT, the extent to which someone finds models interchangeable is inversely proportional to the novelty of their work.
- naravara 6mo agoI mean, if the work is novel it’s almost definitionally an edge case is it not?
- m-s-y 6mo agoA serious project would do the work to be delivered via the native homebrew repository, not a “selfhosted” one.
- nose-wuzzy-pad 6mo agoDoes the local LLM have access to personal information from the Apple account associated with the logged-in user? Maybe through a RAG pipeline or similar? Just curious if there are any risks associated with exposing this in a way that could be exploited via CORS or through another rogue app querying it locally.
- franze 6mo agono. the on device foundationmodels framework that apfel uses does not have access to personal information from the apple account. the model is a bare language model with no built in personal data access. apple does have an on device rag pipeline called the semantic index that feeds personal data like contacts emails calendar and photos into the model context but this is only available to apples own first party features like siri and system summaries. it is not exposed through the foundationmodels api.
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- phplovesong 6mo agoThis is pretty cool. My bet is that we have more LLMs running locally when its possible, either thru "better hardware as default" or some new tech that can run the models on commodity hardware (like apple silicon / equivalent PC setup).
- brtkwr 6mo ago[dead]
- alwinaugustin 6mo agoRead Austria as Australia and thought this as an April fool
- nottorp 6mo ago> Starting with macOS 26 (Tahoe), every Apple Silicon Mac includes a language model as part of Apple Intelligence. So you have to put up with the low contrast buggy UI to use that.
- mattkevan 6mo agoAs an experiment I built a prototype chatbot app that uses the built-in LLM. It’s got a small context window, but is surprisingly capable and has tool-calling support. Without too much effort I was able to get it to fetch weather data, fetch and summarise emails, read and write reminders and calendar events.
- joriskok1 6mo agoHow much storage does it take up?
- volume_tech 6mo ago[dead]
- Barbing 6mo agoJust discovered iOS shortcuts has a native action called “use model” that lets you use local, Apple cloud, or ChatGPT— before that I would have agreed with the author about being locked behind Siri (natively)
- api 6mo agoBoltAI also does this, but a CLI tool is nice. It’s a nice LLM because it seems fairly decent and it loads instantly and uses the CPU neural engine. The GPU is faster but when I run bigger LLMs on the GPU the normally very cool M series Mac becomes a lap roaster. It’s a small LLM though. Seems decent but it’s also been safety trained to a somewhat comical degree. It will balk over safety at requests that are in fact quite banal.
- pbronez 6mo agoDigging into this, found Apple’s release notes for the Foundation Model Service https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Updates/FoundationModels https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Updates/Foundation... They released an official python SDK in March 2026: https://github.com/apple/python-apple-fm-sdk https://github.com/apple/python-apple-fm-sdk
- _2fnr 6mo ago[flagged]
- als0 6mo agoIs this for Tahoe only? I’m still clutching onto Sequoia
- linsomniac 6mo agoYes, it says on that page that it uses Apple Intelligence from Tahoe. I'm also hanging onto Sequoia, though I'm ready to make the leap any time here.
- crena 6mo agoMacBook Neo forced me to finally make the jump, and it turns out that I, much like the engineers at Apple, don't really care about the spit and finish anymore. Third-party applications handle everything else. Also, I was happy to find that Divvy still runs just fine under Rosetta.
- anentropic 6mo agoYeah seems to need Tahoe (I'm on Sequoia): dyld[71398]: Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/FoundationModels.framework/Versions/A/FoundationModels Referenced from: <32818E2F-CB45-3506-A35B-AAF8BDDFFFCE> /opt/homebrew/Cellar/apfel/0.6.25/bin/apfel (built for macOS 26.0 which is newer than running OS) Reason: tried: '/System/Library/Frameworks/FoundationModels.framework/Versions/A/FoundationModels' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/System/Library/Frameworks/FoundationModels.framework/Versions/A/FoundationModels' (no such file), '/System/Library/Frameworks/FoundationModels.framework/Versions/A/FoundationModels' (no such file, not in dyld cache)
- kangraemin 6mo ago[flagged]
- xandrius 6mo agoTry it and see
- downrightmike 6mo ago3,000 words is approximately 6 pages, single-spaced or 11–12 pages, double-space
- rbbydotdev 6mo agoWould really love to see a web api standard for on device llms. This could get us closer. Some in-browser language model usage could be very powerful. In the interim maybe a little protocol spec + a discovery protocol used with browser plugins, web apps could detect and interface with on-device llms making it universally available.
- dchest 6mo agohttps://webmachinelearning.github.io/prompt-api/ https://webmachinelearning.github.io/prompt-api/ Already in Chrome as an origin trial: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
- walthamstow 6mo agoYou have to enable Apple Intelligence so that's a hard no from me. I'll stick to LM Studio and gpt-oss/qwen. Very cool project though.
- btucker 6mo agoI hacked this together last fall to let you use Apple Foundation Models with llm: https://github.com/btucker/llm-apple https://github.com/btucker/llm-apple . To enable that I built python bindings with Claude Code: https://github.com/btucker/apple-foundation-models-py https://github.com/btucker/apple-foundation-models-py Unfortunately, I found the small context window makes the utility pretty limited.
- troyvit 6mo agoYeah I think you hit on the head a good way to use it though. I'm not on MacOS but KDE has a little tool called krunner[1] that lets you perform simple tasks from a small pop-up on your desktop. It would be cool if I could do slightly agentic things from there with a local model like ask what the capital of Austria is, or what's the current exchange rate between two currencies. Then save the heavy lifting for the big boys. [1] https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner
- jasomill 6mo agoI've used Alfred[1] for many years on macOS, and more recently the PowerToys Command Palette[2] on Windows. Both are easily extensible, so you could certainly wire either up to the local (or hosted) LLM of your choice. Side note: I just noticed the extension example in the Command Palette demo reel searches HN. [1] https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/ [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/command-palette/overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/command-...
- mark_l_watson 6mo agoI have been using Apple’s built-in system LLM model for the last 7 or 8 months. I like the feature that if it needs to, it occasionally uses a more powerful secure private cloud model. I also write my own app to wrap it.
- donmb 6mo agoLocal AIs are the future in times of limited resources. This could be the beginning of something big. I like that Apple opens up like this. Hopefully more to come.
- enjoyitasus 6mo agocompletely agree.
- Phemist 6mo agoNice! The example should imo say apfel -o json "Translate to German: apple" | jq .content
- franze 6mo agoThx. Good point. Done.
- Multiplayer 6mo agoStarted using this earlier this week. I built a backtesting benchmark tool to compare a mix of frontier and open-source models on a fairly heavy data analysis workflow I’d been running in the cloud. The task is basically predicting pricing and costs. Apple’s model came out on top—best accuracy in 6 out of 10 cases in the backtest. That surprised me. It also looks like it might be fast enough to take over the whole job. If I ran this on Sonnet, we’re talking thousands per month. With DeepSeek, it’s more like hundreds. So far, the other local models I’ve tried on my 64GB M4 Max Studio haven’t been viable - either far too slow or not accurate enough. That said, I haven’t tested a huge range yet.
- tarwich 6mo agoI'm interested to hear what ends up happening. Going from thousands (is that dollars?) per month to something local is significant and I'm not sure the m4 can really make up the gap. Cloud can scale speed whereas you're limited to one computer. If it works, can it compete in speed, performance AND accuracy? If it can, that would be a real game changer for local analytics when the entire dataset can be loaded onto a single computer.
- animanoir 6mo ago[dead]
- sys_64738 6mo agoTahoe+ only
- EddieLomax 6mo agoThis is similar to something I was playing around with last month-- basically just a CLI for accessing the foundational models. https://github.com/ehamiter/afm https://github.com/ehamiter/afm It's really handy for quick things like "what's the capital of country x" but for coding, I feel that it is severely limited. With such a small context it's (currently) not great for complicated things.
- aiiaro 6mo ago[flagged]
- divan 6mo agoWhat's the easiest way to use it with on-device voice model for voice chat?
- windsurfer 6mo agohttps://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel-gui https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel-gui uses on-device speech-to-text and text-to-speech
- divan 6mo agoThanks, tried it, but it's crashes on clicking the microphone icon. Default `make install` for some reason tries to install it to /usr, I changed that and after torturing more mature coding LLMs for 20 minutes, made it running with mic/sound. The mic button requires clicking to transcribe and start listening again, and default voice is low-quality (I assume it can be configured). In general I'm looking for a way to try the on-device hands-free voice mode.
- contingencies 6mo agohttps://handy.computer https://handy.computer
- satvikpendem 6mo agoHow does this model compare against other local models like Qwen run through LMStudio?
- frontsideair 6mo ago> Apple locked it behind Siri. apfel sets it free This doesn't feel truthful, it sounds like this tool is a hack that unlocks something. If I understand it correctly, it's using the same FoundationModels framework that powers Apple Intelligence, but for CLI and OpenAI compatible REST endpoint. Which is fine, just the marketing goes hard a bit. > Runs on Neural Engine Also unsure if this runs on ANE, when I tried Apple Intelligence I saw that it ran on the GPU (Metal).
- reaperducer 6mo ago[flagged]
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- malcolmgreaves 6mo agoPlease read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The poster said: > Also unsure if this runs on ANE, when I tried Apple Intelligence I saw that it ran on the GPU (Metal). They added something of some substance here. Your post expressing your feelings did not.
- halJordan 6mo agoUsing soft or unsure wording doesn't obviate the factualness of the contribution. The op is correct on both accounts- it's ok to be unsure when putting it forward. You on the other hand contributed literally nothing to the topic
- frontsideair 6mo agoI was able to confirm that it actually runs on ANE, I'm impressed.
- reaperducer 6mo agoapfel "How many shopping days until Christmas?" To determine how many shopping days until Christmas, you'll need to know the current date and the date of Christmas. Christmas is on December 25th, so you can subtract the current date from this date to find the number of shopping days. If you provide the current date, I can help you calculate that. apfel "How many shopping days until Christmas? Today is April 3rd." To calculate the number of shopping days until Christmas, we first need to determine the date of Christmas this year. Christmas in 2023 is on December 25th. Starting from April 3rd, we calculate the days: 1. April: 30 days (from April 3rd to April 30th) 2. May: 31 days 3. June: 30 days 4. July: 31 days 5. August: 31 days 6. September: 30 days 7. October: 31 days 8. November: 30 days Adding these up gives us: 30 + 31 + 30 + 31 + 31 + 30 + 31 + 30 = 252 days Christmas is on December 25th, so we subtract 252 days from today, April 3rd: 252 - 252 = 0 days So, there are 0 shopping days left until Christmas, but since Christmas is already past, there are no shopping days left. Yep, feels like Siri.
- xp84 6mo agoReal experience I've had: "Text Carol bring me a glass of water please" "I'm sorry, I don't see a 'Carol Bring' in your contacts"
- 6persimmon 6mo agoAlmost about to try it until I saw this. If it's Siri the Silly don't even make up for the opportunity cost.
- CharlesW 6mo agoThis isn't a good test for any model since LLMs can't math (even though frontier models can sometimes correctly simulate mathing), which is why one would always use a tool for this.
- furyofantares 6mo agoLooks like a nice wrapper around the APIs. Extremely oversold landing page, very marketing heavy for what it is. You can actually make nice looking landing pages that are about 10% the size of this and more straightforward, rather than some mimicry of a SaaS that's trying desperately to sell you something. Makes it easier for you to review the content for factuality too, and heck you couldn't even take ownership of some of the voice. Hard to know what to do with this. I'm interested in the project and know others who would be, but I feel like shit after being slopped on by a landing page and I don't wish to slop on my friends by sharing it with them. I suppose the github link is indeed significantly better, I'll share that.
- xandrius 6mo agoIt's absolutely free and open source, no need to bash it like this.
- furyofantares 6mo agoI certainly don't feel entitled to anybody's effort, and I appreciate the project itself! It's just these flashy LLM-generated webpages are really misleading. It's filled with attention-grabbing LLM-filler. It presents itself as high-effort content, but in reality is unclear if it's accurate, unclear how much the author even put into READING the content they're asking me to read, and overall just really unclear what parts of the page are important to the author and what are just stuff the LLM inserted into a marketing card to make it look like a SaaS sales pitch.
- wrxd 6mo agoIf you dislike the slop on the website so much you might also not like GitHub that much. It shows this software has been heavily co-written by Claude code
- furyofantares 6mo agoI'm aware of that! That's fine with me.
- devcraft_ai 6mo ago[dead]
- lewisjoe 6mo agoTempted to write a grammarly-like underline engine that flags writing mistakes across all apps and browser. Fully private grammarly alternative without even bundling an LLM!
- malshe 6mo agoThat's a great idea. I would be very interested in using it of someone builds it.
- gurjeet 6mo agoThank you for making it open source! Submitted a PR to prevent its installation on macos versions older than Tahoe(26), since I was able to install it on my older macos 15, but it aborted on execution. https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/homebrew-tap/pull/1 https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/homebrew-tap/pull/1
- adettya009 6mo ago[dead]
- ronb1964 6mo agoI'm a Linux user who wanted exactly this but for Linux — so I ended up building it myself. It's called TalkType, it runs Whisper locally for offline speech-to-text. The privacy angle was a big reason I went local from the start — I didn't want my voice being sent to anyone's server. Nice to see the same idea getting traction on Mac.
- yalogin 6mo agoThis is great. A few questions come to mind, I need to go look up. Is the model an OpenAI one or home grown for Apple. And can I still use it if Siri is disabled?
- contingencies 6mo agoOn a similar bent, I recently discovered Handy (cross-platform) which is very well implemented local voice input: https://handy.computer/ https://handy.computer/ ... serious finger saver and ideal for LLM conversations
- rgbrgb 6mo agolove the simple website and typography. AI design or you? tasteful and fast animations. nice work and thanks for sharing!
- deadfox 6mo agoThis is cool!
- karimf 6mo agoThe big question is whether Apple can keep shipping new models constantly. AFAIK the current model is on par with with Qwen-3-4B, which is from a year ago [0]. There's a big leap going from last year Qwen-3-4B to Qwen-3.5-4B or to Gemma 4. Apple model is nice since you don't need to download anything else, but I'd rather use the latest model than to use a model from a year ago. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-models-2025-updates https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...
- dangus 6mo agoI’m not sure why that’s a question, it’s just a downloaded file. You can even watch it download separately when you enable Apple Intelligence (it’s not tied to OS updates from what I can tell). Of course I imagine Apple is not going to be the fastest mover in this regard. I’m not even sure they believe the product will be widely impactful anymore and may keep it relegated to a small list of popular use cases like photo touch ups and quick questions to Siri. For me the most useful parts of Apple’s AI don’t even require me to enable Apple Intelligence.
- xp84 6mo ago> Referenced from: <32818E2F-CB45-3506-A35B-AAF8BDDFFFCE> /opt/homebrew/Cellar/apfel/0.6.25/bin/apfel (built for macOS 26.0 which is newer than running OS) This actually looks really neat. I'll have to bookmark this for whenever I'm dragged kicking and screaming into the abomination that is "Tahoe."
- witnessme 6mo agoInteresting. How does this foundational model compares with other LLMs?
- contingencies 6mo ago1. Hugely non-deterministic: repeat queries give vastly different responses. 2. Often returns incorrect and inconsistent results even for mathematical queries. 3. Often the responses include unwanted highlighting or presentation markup. 4. Defaults to German decimal notation.
- andy_xor_andrew 6mo agoI find the branding to be a little odd. Like, it should be a github page with a README that says "here's how to use this." Like, the full explanation of this project is right there in the HN title: "The free AI already on your Mac." I guess LLMs have made it too simple to instantly build startup landing page slop, which causes this? Like, do we need to see the github star count chart? Do we need all the buzzwords and stuff? You'd think this was a startup trying to get a billion dollar evaluation. It feels disingenuous. Maybe I'm just being a hater.
- mrbonner 6mo agoThis is great. I think Apple bought Kuzu, a in memory graph database in late 2025 to support RAG in combine with their FM like this. Even with such as small model, a comprehensive context of our personal data in graph RAG would be sufficient for a PA system. Do we know if we can have access to this RAG data?
- newman314 6mo agoSaw this in an another thread previously and immediately installed it. I have a new prompt to test LLMs much like simonw's pelican test. "What is 9:30am Taiwan time in US, Pacific?" For some reason, the answers are quite inconsistent but all wrong. ./apfel "what is 9:30am Taiwan time in US, Pacific?" Taiwan is 12 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM Taiwan time would be 9:30 PM Pacific Time. Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 10:30 PM in the Pacific Time Zone. Taiwan is in the China Standard Time (CST) zone, which is 12 hours ahead of the Pacific Standard Time (PST) zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 9:30 PM in the Pacific. Taiwan is typically 11 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 8:30 PM in the Pacific Time Zone. Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 10:30 PM the previous day in the Pacific Time Zone.
- gibsonsmog 6mo agoWhat a neat LLM question! Most of my results were the same as what you posted except for the first time I asked it which resulted in this pretty interesting answer: Taiwan is in the Taiwan Standard Time (TST) zone, which is UTC+8, while the Pacific Time (PT) zone is UTC-7. To convert 9:30 AM Taiwan time to Pacific Time: 1. Subtract 15 hours (since 8 hours ahead is 15 hours behind). 9:30 AM - 15 hours = 6:30 AM PT. So, 9:30 AM Taiwan time is 6:30 AM Pacific Time. Never thought to use an llm for time zone stuff. Seems like it struggles as much as a normal person, which makes some sense given what they're trained with.
- zopf 6mo agoWow - the model really hallucinates without hesitation. I asked a number of "What do you know about [person, company, etc]?" questions and rather than realizing that it didn't know about them, it just made up an answer for every one of them.
- jomohke 6mo ago[dead]
- millionclicks 6mo agoAwesome idea. You should launch this on Buildfeed.co.
- lispisok 6mo agoI want access to the LLM xcode uses for swift auto completions
- suradethchaipin 6mo ago[flagged]
- HironoOcto 6mo ago[dead]
- Xentyon 6mo agoInteresting approach. I've been building MCP tools for AI agents recently and the local-first model makes a lot of sense for privacy-sensitive use cases. Does Apfel support MCP tool calling?
- wodenokoto 6mo agoWhich Apple silicon support this and how good are the models available to different generations? I’m assume an M4 can and will run bigger models than an M2
- Eggpants 6mo agoI asked it to write a python program to find the intersection of a line and a circle and it one shot it. Asking for a Swift version worked as well. Rust version goofed with lines of comments and code intertwined. I asked what highway connects two given cities that it got wrong but would have been correct if I asked for two other cities. I asked it to save answers to a file or notes but no burrito Asked for an ascii drawing of a race car. Not sure what that thing was it returned.
- victorbjorklund 6mo agoBut by access to the private compute right?
- gregkb 6mo agowow, had a very similar idea, but smaller in scope. (focusing on shell script usage) I've documented my own journey over here https://github.com/greg76/aii https://github.com/greg76/aii
- calvinsun1102 6mo ago“Already on your Mac” is a strong hook. Curious where you see local-first AI breaking down compared to API-based workflows.
- NyxVox 6mo agoI have a project similar to this one, running on Windows 11 because I am not an Apple user. 3B model is actually OK for simple tasks and short contexts. And I strongly support completely local inference. I don't agree with some commentators that using cloud services is still fine.
- moropex 6mo agointeresting that they added mcp support. local model + tool calling with no cloud dependency is a nice setup
- aimemobe 6mo ago[flagged]
- amai 6mo agoWhat is going on in Vienna? First OpenClaw, now this tool. I see a lot of AI (Austrian Intelligence) recently.