To clarify, this MIT-licensed app is from the very same dev, 'Prince Canuma', who maintains the popular MLX-VLM library (https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-vlm). MLX-VLM is a long-time dependency of the excellent LM Studio and others because it can provide faster inference on Apple devices than llama.cpp. Historically, MLX is a smaller community than CUDA, but has some of the fastest updates upon the release of new models, particularly in models with modalities beyond text-in, text-out (vision, STT, TTS, video gen). See also (https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio-swift). Would be totally unsurprised if those modalities and models get integrated into this UI.
Possibly vibe-coded landing page notwithstanding, the app is mostly written in Swift language. That suggests it will be easy to port this inference stack to iPad and iPhone.
erikkahler
Is „frontier“ overused? I thought frontier models were the best-of-the-best such as Fable right now. I assume you can’t host these models yourself since you would need many GB of RAM and expensive GPU of is my thinking of „frontier models“ wrong?
moontear
I'm surprised that their home page basically acts as if LM Studio and others don't already do this. It's not clear what the difference is from a glance.
It also omits Open WebUI. I've been running Deepseek V4 Flash locally on my Macbook Pro for weeks using Open WebUI + DS4.
D13Fd
I really don't like the marketing texts.
"Why we’re open source when nobody else is."
I'm using oMLX which is open source and seems to be doing everything Nativ offers. I'd rather see the comparison with existing "non-existing" open source competitors.
Nekorosu
The word "frontier" is like "load-bearing" at this point (Claude Code users will know what I mean). I wish we could stop using it. Especially as this does not, in fact, run the leading/top models locally on your Mac.
jwr
Genuinely curious: what are people using these smaller local models for? They are getting decently capable, but they are still small enough that I don't trust them for "real" work outside of a handful of fun toy projects.
Are people actually using them in coding agents? Or are they mostly using them for other things?
JosNun
Is Gemma 4 E2B actually "usable"?
I've been running Gemma 4 12B and it handles everything very well!
But the second I've moved down to E4B it's been unable to perform the simplest of tasks.
So I can't even imagine how E2B would do...
Or am I doing something wrong?
Daunk
Looking forward to giving this a try. I have tried MLX using Rapid MLX however the LLM (Qwen) would always have hiccups and get stuck repeating itself.
Moving onto llama.cpp I was able to get faster tokens with MTP and a more reliable llm.
I wonder what other people's experiences are using MLX vs llama.cpp
shitcoder
How is it better than, say, LM Studio? And does it run MTP models (which from what I understand are GGUF)?
jwr
What is the “middlest” Mac one could get for this? I’m in the market but keep going back and forth between a 64gb m5 pro or “lower end m5 air and screw it I’ll just pay for cloud tokens”. At current prices the 2-3k diff to try to run something local that isn’t as powerful could buy a lot of tokens.
comments (10)
Possibly vibe-coded landing page notwithstanding, the app is mostly written in Swift language. That suggests it will be easy to port this inference stack to iPad and iPhone.
erikkahler
moontear
It also omits Open WebUI. I've been running Deepseek V4 Flash locally on my Macbook Pro for weeks using Open WebUI + DS4.
D13Fd
Nekorosu
jwr
Are people actually using them in coding agents? Or are they mostly using them for other things?
JosNun
Daunk
Moving onto llama.cpp I was able to get faster tokens with MTP and a more reliable llm.
I wonder what other people's experiences are using MLX vs llama.cpp
shitcoder
jwr
shireboy