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

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Zero everything.

The AI is already installed on your Mac. Apple ships it with macOS. apfel just gives you a way to talk to it - from your terminal, from your code, from anywhere.

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UNIX Tool

Pipe-friendly and composable. Works with jq, xargs, and your shell scripts. stdin, stdout, JSON output, file attachments, proper exit codes.

{ }

OpenAI Server

Drop-in replacement at localhost:11434. Point any OpenAI SDK at it and go. Streaming, tool calling, CORS, response formats.

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Interactive Chat

Multi-turn conversations with automatic context management. Five trimming strategies. System prompt support. All on your Mac.

Apple ships an on-device LLM

Starting with macOS 26 (Tahoe), every Apple Silicon Mac includes a language model as part of Apple Intelligence. Apple exposes it through the FoundationModels framework - a Swift API that gives apps access to SystemLanguageModel. All inference runs on the Neural Engine and GPU. No network calls, no cloud, no API keys. The model is just there.

But Apple only uses it for Siri

Out of the box, the on-device model powers Siri, Writing Tools, and system features. There is no terminal command, no HTTP endpoint, no way to pipe text through it. The FoundationModels framework exists, but you need to write a Swift app to use it. That is what apfel does.

What apfel adds

apfel is a Swift 6.3 binary that wraps LanguageModelSession and exposes it three ways: as a UNIX command-line tool with stdin/stdout, as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server (built on Hummingbird), and as an interactive chat with context management.

It handles the things Apple's raw API does not: proper exit codes, JSON output, file attachments, five context trimming strategies for the small 4096-token window, real token counting via the SDK, and conversion of OpenAI tool schemas to Apple's native Transcript.ToolDefinition format.

hardware Apple Silicon (Neural Engine + GPU)

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model Apple's on-device LLM (shipped with macOS)

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sdk FoundationModels.framework (Swift API)

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apfel CLI + HTTP server + context management

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you Terminal, shell scripts, OpenAI SDKs, curl

>_

cmd

Natural language to shell command. Say what you want, get the command.

$ cmd "find all .log files modified today"

|>

oneliner

Pipe chains from plain English. awk, sed, sort, uniq - generated for you.

$ oneliner "count unique IPs in access.log"

**

mac-narrator

Narrates your Mac's system activity like a nature documentary.

$ mac-narrator --watch

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explain

Explain any command, error message, or code snippet in plain English.

$ explain "awk '{print $1}' file | sort -u"

./

wtd

What's this directory? Instant project orientation for any codebase.

$ wtd

++

gitsum

Summarize recent git commits in a few sentences.

$ gitsum

Drop-in replacement

apfel speaks the OpenAI API. Any client library, any framework, any tool that talks to OpenAI can talk to your Mac's AI instead. Just change the base URL.

• ✓ POST /v1/chat/completions
• ✓ Streaming (SSE)
• ✓ Tool calling / function calling
• ✓ GET /v1/models
• ✓ response_format: json_object
• ✓ temperature, max_tokens, seed
• ✓ CORS for browser clients

from openai import OpenAI

# Just change the base_url. That's it.
client = OpenAI(
    base_url="http://localhost:11434/v1",
    api_key="unused"  # no auth needed
)

resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="apple-foundationmodel",
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": "What is 1+1?"
    }],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

214

GitHub stars

123 stars on March 31 alone. Created March 24, 2026 - first public release of Apple's on-device LLM as a command-line tool.

Star on GitHub

Data as of April 3, 2026