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

https://reddit.com/link/1ws5l5p/video/oarqcgm767sh1/player

GitHub: https://github.com/jagdishpal02000/apple-llm