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

Posted by franze 12 hours ago

Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac(apfel.franzai.com)

Github: https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel

594 points | 136 commentspage 2

lewisjoe 6 hours ago|

Tempted 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 5 hours ago|

That's a great idea. I would be very interested in using it of someone builds it.

ronb1964 6 hours ago||

I'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.

mrbonner 2 hours ago||

This 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?

khalic 11 hours ago||

AFM models are very impressive, but they’re not made for conversation, so keep your expectations down in chat mode.

donmb 8 hours ago||

Local 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 7 hours ago|

completely agree.

Barbing 8 hours ago||

Just 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)

rbbydotdev 8 hours ago||

Would 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 8 hours ago|

https://webmachinelearning.github.io/prompt-api/

Already in Chrome as an origin trial: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api

kangraemin 8 hours ago||

[flagged]

downrightmike 2 hours ago||

3,000 words is approximately 6 pages, single-spaced or 11–12 pages, double-space

xandrius 5 hours ago||

Try it and see

Phemist 8 hours ago||

Nice! The example should imo say

apfel -o json "Translate to German: apple" | jq .content

franze 3 hours ago|

Thx. Good point. Done.

btucker 8 hours ago|

I hacked this together last fall to let you use Apple Foundation Models with llm: https://github.com/btucker/llm-apple . To enable that I built python bindings with Claude Code: https://github.com/btucker/apple-foundation-models-py

Unfortunately, I found the small context window makes the utility pretty limited.

troyvit 7 hours ago|

Yeah 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

jasomill 3 hours ago||

I'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/

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/command-...

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