macOS 27 ships a free local LLM on Apple Silicon Macs. I made it easy to use from Node and Python
Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 26+ come with a small LLM built in. No download, no API key, and nothing leaves your Mac.
Why I built it
I was making a tool that writes API docs from code, and I didn't want users to install Ollama or paste an API key. Apple's model was already on their Mac, so I used it.
Getting it to work well was harder than expected. At temperature 0 it kept repeating itself, and a 2-second call took 20. Calls took 17 seconds instead of 1.5 until I kept one process running. So I turned all the fixes into a library: apple-llm.
What it's good for
\- Pulling structured data out of messy text, like emails into tickets or receipts into expenses. The JSON always matches your schema.
\- Tagging, summarising and rewriting
\- Private data you don't want to send anywhere
\- Tools you share with other Mac users, who don't need to download a model or get a key
What it's bad at
Coding and long reasoning. It's a small model.
There's also an optional cloud mode that uses Apple's bigger server model for harder questions. That one is not local: your prompt goes to Apple's servers, and it has a usage limit.
Node: npm install apple-llm
Python: pip install apple-llm