nativ

nativ runs AI models locally on your Mac, built for Apple Silicon specifically using MLX, Apple's own ML framework. Chat with local models, do vision and image tasks, manage what you've downloaded, and expose an OpenAI or Anthropic-compatible endpoint so your coding tools can hit a model running on your own machine. MIT, free, no account.

Setup is about as easy as local AI gets: download the DMG, drag it to Applications, launch. It auto-updates. The only real gate is hardware. You need an Apple Silicon Mac and macOS 26, which is a very new OS to require, plus enough unified memory for whatever model you load.

For privacy-sensitive work, or just dodging API bills, running models locally is the move, and on a modern Mac nativ makes it painless, solo or small team, at no cost. It competes with LM Studio and Ollama front-ends; the difference is it's MLX-native and Mac-only by design. The catch: that Mac-only, macOS 26 requirement locks out everyone else, and a couple of the headline features (audio models, image generation as a chat tool) are still "coming soon" rather than shipped. Solid today, with asterisks.