apfel
Use the AI already on your Mac — Apple's on-device LLM from the terminal
About apfel
Overview
apfel is an open-source CLI tool that exposes Apple's built-in on-device language model (FoundationModels framework, part of Apple Intelligence) as a Unix command, an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server, and an interactive chat interface — all running locally with zero API costs. It supports stdin/stdout piping, JSON output, file attachments, MCP tool calling, and five context-trimming strategies. Requires macOS Tahoe (26+) with Apple Intelligence enabled on Apple Silicon.
Key Features
- Completely free — no API keys, no token costs, no subscriptions
- Full privacy: all processing on-device, zero network calls to external servers
- OpenAI API-compatible — drop-in local replacement for existing integrations
- Zero setup: Apple's model is pre-installed, just install apfel and go
- MCP support enables powerful tool-calling workflows
- 1,500+ GitHub stars within two weeks of launch — strong community momentum
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