This is cool!
Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
121–130 of 180 posts
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#122The 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-...
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#123> 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 Appl…
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Please read the guidelines: 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.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#124> Referenced from: /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."
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#125Interesting. How does this foundational model compares with other LLMs?
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
local 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…
> i personally think you don't need to go local. I personally think everyone should default to using local resources. Cloud resources should only be used for expansion and be relatively bursty rather than the default.
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Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#127It’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.
Apparently the Overcast guy build a beowulf cluster of Mac minis to use the Apple transcription service. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathangathright_marco-arment-...
The 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.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#128apfel "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…
Real 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"
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#129Tempted 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!
That's a great idea. I would be very interested in using it of someone builds it.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#1301. 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.