apfel is the free AI already on your Mac. macOS Tahoe ships with a 3B parameter LLM (quick tasks yes, complex reasoning no).
- Apple quietly embedded a 3 billion parameter language model into macOS Tahoe, primarily to power on-device Siri and system features, but without any official terminal interface for power users.
- The apfel tool is a thin CLI wrapper that pipes your prompts directly to that built-in model, meaning inference runs locally with no data leaving the machine.
- A 3B parameter model is modest compared to cloud offerings, so expect it to handle quick scripting help or text tasks well but struggle with complex reasoning.
