Apple silicon

7 items

Verified only

RemoveMacAI's project card: the heading Turn Apple Intelligence off. Get 12 GB back., a line about one command for macOS 27 and one more to undo it, a toggle switch in the off position, and the install command in a terminal box.

Tools

An open source tool turns off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and deletes its models

RemoveMacAI is an open source command line tool that turns off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27, removes the downloaded models, and blocks macOS from downloading them again. Its author says macOS 27 no longer has a single switch for these features and keeps the models on disk after they are turned off. MacRumors puts the space freed at roughly 12 GB, depending on which models are installed. The first release came out on September 29, 2026, and four more followed by October 5, 2026.

RemoveMacAIOctober 5verified

Machines & local models

llama.cpp 0.6.0 adds GLM-5.3-Flash support and a server API for decision models

The llama.cpp project released version 0.6.0 on October 5, 2026. It adds support for GLM-5.3-Flash, a model for text and images with 320 billion parameters, and a new server endpoint for decision models. Two changes to speculative decoding come with measurements from their authors, one on Nvidia's DGX Spark and one on Apple GPUs. The release also changes the C API and raises the version of the saved session format, so programs built on the library need a check before you upgrade.

llama.cppOctober 5verified

Machines & local models

Transformers now loads llama.cpp GGUF quants on Apple Silicon

A GGUF checkpoint can be passed straight to from_pretrained and run with its weights still packed, using ggml's Metal kernels through the kernels library. The target is a single interactive conversation on an Apple Silicon Mac, and the packed path covers the Qwen3.5 dense and mixture-of-experts architectures plus compatible Qwen3.8 checkpoints. Hugging Face says the result comes close to llama.cpp on the three checkpoints it measured, while noting the two measurements were not taken under identical conditions. It still recommends llama.cpp when efficient local inference is the priority.

Hugging FaceSeptember 23verified

Machines & local models

Apple claims 4.3x faster AI on Mac Studio, and the 512GB configuration arrives in late October

Mac Studio with M5 Max and the all-new M5 Ultra reaches stores on September 22, 2026, and Apple puts its AI performance at up to 4.3x the previous generation, measured in July 2026 against a machine with M3 Ultra. The configuration that decides how large a local model can be, 512GB of unified memory at up to 1.2TB/s, sits in a footnote: it comes in late October. On the software side the new Siri AI ships in beta, in English to start, and will not be available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS or watchOS at launch. Apple Intelligence features that run on server-side models also have daily usage limits, and Apple says wider access to them will be sold for a fee later.

AppleSeptember 11verified

Machines & local models

llama.cpp 0.4.0 adds four model architectures, an Apple RDMA transport, and video flags

The 0.4.0 release landed on September 4, 2026, and it is a numbered version rather than one of the nightly builds. It adds initial support for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, NVIDIA Nemotron-3-Puzzle-75B-A9B, DSpark on Nemotron 3.5, and nanbeige4.2-3B. Apple RDMA becomes an RPC transport, video arrives as command-line options, and the quantizer gains a memory ceiling. Two server defaults changed, and saved session state carries a new version number.

llama.cppSeptember 5verified

Machines & local models

Memory sets what you can run locally, and price per token sets whether you should

A local model has one hard requirement before speed, quality or license enter the discussion: the weights have to fit in memory. That turns the machine question into arithmetic you can do on paper, and Apple's August 25 desktops give you three price points to do it against — $899 for a 32GB ceiling, $2,499 for 128GB, $5,499 for 512GB. This guide works through what fits where, which runner to use, what each size class is good for, and how many tokens it takes before a machine beats paying by the token.

Apple, OpenRouter, DeepSeekAugust 27verified

Machines & local models

Apple priced the memory, and memory is what a local model actually costs

The new Mac Studio goes to 512GB of unified memory at $5,499, though that configuration does not arrive until late October; the new Mac mini stops at 32GB and starts at $899. For anyone running models on their own machine, that gap is the whole product line, and Apple is now selling it that way.

AppleAugust 26verified