apfel: Free AI already on your Mac
13 points by eduard
13 points by eduard
This vibe coded website's demo animation is layout shifting all the other fluff content on the page. CSS alone doesn't make a site look professional.
It goes to show that LLMs aren't magically imbued with good taste and an eye for UX. A caveat of making the "statistically most likely" website is that most of the web is kind of crappy.
What bothers me most here is the tiny, sub-16px text that ignores my browser default font size. Also, some of the text has an opacity of 0.35 resulting an audacious 1.59 contrast ratio.
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).
This is neat, but I'd rather it exposes the good parts of Apple's AI's, the OCR and the speech to text stuff. That stuff is at least decent/good and nice to run locally.
Has anyone tried this? How good is the Mac OS built-in LLM?
The repo has example prompts and output for a variety of tasks. It's not replacing cloud models any time soon.
Yesterday I was playing with Gemma 4 E4B on my MacBook Air. Then I saw this post and decided to ask it the same questions: https://github.com/bart-de-zoete/gemma4-macos-test I also recorded response time and tokens/s
From skimming the answers, it seems this model is considerably more capable than the built-in LLM. The long thinking process makes it impractical, and the cloud models are certainly much better. Still, I'm impressed and believe there are good use cases
Now what I want to know is how I can get that LLM off my mac.
Sounds like a security risk