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

(apfel.franzai.com)

149 points | by franze 2 hours ago

12 comments

  • Oras 1 minute ago
    I like the idea and the clarity to explain the usage, my question would be: what kind of tasks it would be useful for?
    • khalic 0 minutes ago
      Making a sentence out of a json
  • brians 29 minutes ago
    I’ve seen several projects like this that offer a network server with access to these Apple models. The danger is when they expose that, even on a loop port, to every other application on your system, including the browser. Random webpages are now shipping with JavaScript that will post to that port. Same-origin restrictions will stop data flow back to the webpage, but that doesn’t stop them from issuing commands to make changes.

    Some such projects use CORS to allow read back as well. I haven’t read Apfel’s code yet, but I’m registering the experiment before performing it.

    • brians 25 minutes ago
      They offer it as an option but default it to false! This is still a --footgun option but it’s the least unsafe version I’ve seen yet! Well done, Apfel authors.
    • stingraycharles 26 minutes ago
      I don’t think many browsers will allow posting to 127.0.0.1 from a random website. What’s the threat model here?
      • brians 25 minutes ago
        I think any browser will allow it but not allow data read back.
        • airza 1 minute ago
          There is a CORS preflight check for POST requests that don't use form-encoding. It would be somewhat surprising if these weren't using JSON (though it wouldn't be that surprising if they were parsing submitted JSON instead of actually checking the MIME-type which would probably be bad anwyay)
        • mememememememo 22 minutes ago
          Isn't there a CORS preflight check for this? In most cases. I guess you could fashion an OG form to post form fields. But openai is probably a JSON body only.

          The default scenario should be secure. If the local site sends permissive CORS headers bets may be off. I would need to check but https->http may be a blocker too even in that case. Unless the attack site is http.

  • khalic 1 hour ago
    AFM models are very impressive, but they’re not made for conversation, so keep your expectations down in chat mode.
  • swiftcoder 1 hour ago
    Anyone tried using this as a sub-agent for a more capable model like Claude/Codex?
    • LatencyKills 1 hour ago
      The combined (input/output) context window length is 4K. Claude would blow through that even when trying to read and summarize a small file.
    • franze 56 minutes ago
      project started with

      trying to run openclaw with it in ultra token saving mode, did totally not work.

      great for shell scripts though (my major use case now)

  • franze 2 hours ago
  • gigatexal 55 minutes ago
    It’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.

  • elcritch 1 hour ago
    Any know if these only installed on Tahoe? I'm running Sequoia still and get an error about model not found.
    • HelloUsername 1 hour ago
      > Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26 Tahoe or newer, Apple Intelligence enabled
  • p1anecrazy 1 hour ago
    Really like demo cli tools description. Are they limited by the context window as well? What’s your experience with log file sizes?
    • franze 1 hour ago
      the 2 hard limits of Appel Intelligence Foundation Model and therefor apfel is the 4k token context window and the super hard guardrails (the model prefers to tell you nothing before it tells you something wrong ie ask it to describe a color)

      parsing logfiles line by line, sure

      parsing a whole logfile, well it must be tiny, logfile hardly ever are

  • Remi_Etien 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • skrun_dev 2 hours ago
    Notes.app handles big notebooks without choking on storage?
  • ramon156 35 minutes ago
    Cool tool but I don't get why these websites make idiotic claims

    > $0 cost

    No kidding.

    Why not just link the GH Github: https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel