Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

Does 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.

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. 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.

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> 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.

As 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.