Options For Local AI

Siri in the iOS 27 beta is great for world knowledge and for asking about things on device that involve your personal data. This is going to be a really big release that will improve everyone's experience using Apple devices. But if you want to do programming-related tasks without paying a fortune, you have some great options.

I'm currently running oMLX and Opencode on my Mac Studio. The models I've been using the most are "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-OptiQ-4bit" (a 35-billion parameter model compressed to 4-bit quantization) and "Qwen3.6-27B-UD-Q6_K_XL-mlx" (27 billion parameters at 6-bit quantization). It's really amazing how well these local models perform.

I've already created multiple scripts and apps using just these local models. I've found and fixed numerous issues using these tools. It can be as simple as having them review my changes and point out issues I missed. You really don't have to spend any money to do even complex work.