Apfel: Every Mac Now Has a Free Agent Runtime Built In
Here's something most people don't know: every Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe already has a language model sitting on disk. Apple locked it behind Siri. Apfel sets it free.
Apfel is an open-source CLI tool that wraps Apple's built-in FoundationModels framework and exposes it three ways: as a UNIX command-line tool with stdin/stdout, as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server, and as an interactive chat. No API keys, no cloud, no subscription. Every token is generated locally on your machine.
The OpenAI-compatible server is the killer feature for the agentic ecosystem. Any framework that talks to OpenAI — LangChain, CrewAI, Claude Code, whatever — can point at your Mac's local model by just changing the base URL. That turns every Mac into a zero-cost, zero-latency agent runtime for lightweight tasks.
It's also pipe-friendly and composable. You can cat a file into it, pipe output to jq, chain it with xargs. It supports file attachments, JSON output, exit codes for scripting, and function calling. Basically everything you need to make it a building block in an agent workflow.
622 points on Hacker News today. The repo is at github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel. This isn't a model launch — it's a gateway. Apple put the hardware and the model on every desk. Apfel gives agents the key.
https://apfel.franzai.com/
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Apfel is an open-source CLI tool that wraps Apple's built-in FoundationModels framework and exposes it three ways: as a UNIX command-line tool with stdin/stdout, as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server, and as an interactive chat. No API keys, no cloud, no subscription. Every token is generated locally on your machine.
The OpenAI-compatible server is the killer feature for the agentic ecosystem. Any framework that talks to OpenAI — LangChain, CrewAI, Claude Code, whatever — can point at your Mac's local model by just changing the base URL. That turns every Mac into a zero-cost, zero-latency agent runtime for lightweight tasks.
It's also pipe-friendly and composable. You can cat a file into it, pipe output to jq, chain it with xargs. It supports file attachments, JSON output, exit codes for scripting, and function calling. Basically everything you need to make it a building block in an agent workflow.
622 points on Hacker News today. The repo is at github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel. This isn't a model launch — it's a gateway. Apple put the hardware and the model on every desk. Apfel gives agents the key.
https://apfel.franzai.com/
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