Apple put a local model in the macOS 27 terminal — and left the big one at the keynote
macOS 27 ships fm, a terminal command for Apple's on-device model: free, offline and account-free, but a 3B model capped at 4,096 tokens with no cloud twin.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
On September 15 a post in r/LocalLLaMA headlined "Apple Foundation Models: local AI natively on MacOS 27" drew roughly 200 points and about 68 comments. The poster, u/Cherlokoms, wrote that Apple had made its model available natively and "just run fm chat in a terminal," calling it "a huge step in the direction of local AI." The command is real and it ships with macOS 27: the binary sits at /usr/bin/fm, and Apple's own WWDC26 session says it "comes pre-installed with macOS 27."
What the command does
Apple's WWDC26 session 334, "Build AI-powered scripts with the fm CLI and Python SDK," frames fm as a way to test prompts from a terminal or fold a model into automation:
fm chat— interactive; sessions live in ~/.fm/sessions/ and resume with --continue or --resumefm respond— one prompt, streaming by defaultfm serve— an HTTP endpoint speaking the same chat-completions format as OpenAI's API--schemawithfm schema object— forces JSON output
The Python SDK installs with pip install apple_fm_sdk and needs Python 3.10+, Xcode and Apple Silicon.
What the model will not do
The default is the on-device model, and Apple's documentation calls it a device-scale model for summarization, extraction and classification — roughly 3 billion parameters, with a 4,096-token limit covering instructions, prompt and answer together. Apple's own examples are summarizing text, extracting people and places, rewriting, classifying, generating tags, and answering a question about a supplied passage; it tells developers to avoid code, math and logical reasoning.
A hands-on test on macOS 27.0 (build 26A428) put five beginner terminal questions to it twice. It got none fully right either time: it explained a Homebrew subcommand that does not exist, called the current macOS "Sonoma" then "Monterey," and answered a genuine Java-runtime error with "Unable to work with that request." On its advertised strengths it did better — a three-sentence article summary with nothing invented, and correct file tags.
The fine print
Two frictions sit under "just run fm chat." Nothing works until someone accepts Apple's machine-wide CLI legal notice with sudo fm license; before that the command exits with status 69 and writes its warning to stderr, so a script capturing output sees an empty string. The models need 7 GB of storage and download on Apple's schedule, with no progress bar and no fm --version. The Private Cloud Compute model shown at WWDC, reached with --model pcc, is not in macOS 27.0. A free, offline, account-free model in a stock OS is genuinely new; a 3B model its maker steers away from reasoning is not the frontier. Anyone running capable open models on local hardware or quantized 7B checkpoints is working in a different league.
