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

(apfel.franzai.com)

102 points | by franze 2 hours ago

9 comments

  • swiftcoder 34 minutes ago
    Anyone tried using this as a sub-agent for a more capable model like Claude/Codex?
    • LatencyKills 23 minutes 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 19 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)

  • khalic 41 minutes ago
    AFM models are very impressive, but they’re not made for conversation, so keep your expectations down in chat mode.
  • gigatexal 18 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.

    • thenthenthen 10 minutes ago
      The vision models and OCR are SUPER
  • franze 2 hours ago
  • elcritch 39 minutes ago
    Any know if these only installed on Tahoe? I'm running Sequoia still and get an error about model not found.
    • HelloUsername 33 minutes ago
      > Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26 Tahoe or newer, Apple Intelligence enabled
  • p1anecrazy 59 minutes 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 50 minutes 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

  • skrun_dev 2 hours ago
    Notes.app handles big notebooks without choking on storage?
  • Remi_Etien 1 hour ago
    [dead]