Apple has new Mac app coming to make running local AI models easy

pen2l

Apple, to me, is the winner in the end of this AI chapter. Distillation works: we can get models leaner, have better performance with lesser and lesser parameters, more efficient, running locally. Apple gets this and we'll see the result with M7 Max/ultra chips and I reckon this will be one of the titular apps when M7 line of chips are introduced. I guess it explains the haste Anthropic and OpenAI are in to IPO, cash out and leave the the retail investor holding the bag.

mgiampapa

I love that they are bringing Claris back for this. Moof!

MBCook

But you’re still in for a ton of pain if you want to run them headless right? They desperately need to fix that.

q4y2u35uk

Hopefully it won't be another preinstalled bloatware app like Image Playground. macOS enshittification has been greatly accelerating, even giving Win 11 Home a run for its money.

w10-1

OMG after 25 years, Claris gets something beyond FileMaker (among the most legacy software still alive)? Claris would not have the engineering talent, so why would Apple use them as a vector?

simonw

"Harbor is currently in a private preview under Apple’s Claris brand" There's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Claris (always an Apple subsidiary, since being founded in 1987) renamed themselves to FileMaker in 1998, but apparently they rebranded back to Claris in 2019. Looks like they've mostly just released annual upgrades to FileMaker for the past decade, but they did add MCP to it last year: https://www.claris.com/blog/2025/why-mcp-matters-for-claris-...

zf00002

You can chat with the local model that ships with macos on your M1+ mac right now. There's a few servers on github that make it easy.

liuliu

https://getlocalcode.app/ runs local AI models (larger ones of course, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017) easy. You can download and try it now. The problem is elsewhere: you cannot find M5 Ultra that you can purchase and set it up today.

jedbrooke

> Cluster for scale: “Connect two or more Thunderbolt 5-capable Mac computers and Harbor pools their unified memory into a single inference resource. Run models that exceed any single computer’s capacity, or serve more concurrent requests across your cluster.” This seems like the main way it would differentiate itself over existing solutions like LMStudio etc.

chews

Deepseek has found safe harbor!

gizmodo59

I really want capable models local but it’s impossible for me to afford the hardware. If there is a magical way to run glm 5.3 without quantization at 80-100tps with a total spend of less than 10K I’d be happy but that’s impossible now.

tonymet

Why so much investment in local models when the remote ones are so cheap ? Everyone was fine with remote compute & storage before AI, now they balk?

kenferry

"Harbor is currently in a private preview under Apple’s Claris brand, but it seems likely that we’ll see it launch to the public in the weeks and months ahead." Claris?? Ok, this sounds like it's just someone's personal project. Something like this that was actually going to ship would be in a different org.

apparent

This is what I've wanted for the last few years. I have played around with local models and had some success, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of setting up, updating, etc. If all of this were easy, I would happily invest in new dedicated hardware to run it. This could be a full-blown Mac or it could be a souped up HomePod-type device, loaded with RAM. Better yet, make it a revitalized Matter-enabled Airport!

D13Fd

What would make running local models easy is being able to buy a Mac Studio without a 6-month delay :-(

quaddoggy

After I think about it, this makes sense that Claris would tackle such a project under the auspices of Apple. They're a subsidiary so they can monkey around with this stuff without having to adhere to the draconian everyday operating restrictions of "Apple proper". Good on them if they can pivot into something that hews to AI.

nier

(1) All the headaches of maintaining FileMaker Server on Apple hardware, (2) multiplied with the additional requirement to cluster devices, (3) but without users accustomed to the silliness of misusing consumer devices running a consumer operating system for a service that must be reliable, and (4) an Apple subsidiary unable to bring about meaningful change.