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

brians 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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brians 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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stingraycharles 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think many browsers will allow posting to 127.0.0.1 from a random website. What’s the threat model here?

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brians 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think any browser will allow it but not allow data read back.

	▲	mememememememo 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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khalic an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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swiftcoder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyone tried using this as a sub-agent for a more capable model like Claude/Codex?

	▲	LatencyKills an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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)

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franze 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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gigatexal an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	bombcar 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Apparently the Overcast guy build a beowulf cluster of Mac minis to use the Apple transcription service. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathangathright_marco-arment-...
	▲	thenthenthen 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The vision models and OCR are SUPER

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elcritch an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any know if these only installed on Tahoe? I'm running Sequoia still and get an error about model not found.

	▲	HelloUsername an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26 Tahoe or newer, Apple Intelligence enabled

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p1anecrazy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really like demo cli tools description. Are they limited by the context window as well? What’s your experience with log file sizes?

	▲	franze an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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

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skrun_dev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Notes.app handles big notebooks without choking on storage?

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ramon156 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	ffsm8 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		He did? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624647