Apple offers new Mac app to make it easier to run local AI models

Leaker Aaron Perris has discovered evidence of a new Mac app in the works at Apple called Harbour, which makes it easier to run local AI models on one or more Macs.

New “Harbor” application unveiled at Apple: “turns your Mac into a private AI inference server”

The Mac has become much more popular this year, both because of budget-friendly options like the MacBook Neo, but also as a tool for running AI models locally on Mac Studio, Mac mini, and more.

It appears Apple is planning to delve more into the latter use case, as leaker Aaron Perris has discovered a new Mac app called Harbor, designed to turn your Mac into a private AI inference server.

Here is Perris’ post on X with details:

As the article notes, here’s what the app does:

Harbor turns your Mac into a private AI inference server. Run open models locally on Apple silicon—your data never leaves your hardware and nothing reaches the cloud. Connect multiple Mac computers via Thunderbolt 5 to pool unified memory, enabling larger models and higher concurrency than a single computer can handle on its own.

And here are the feature highlights:

• Setup in minutes, not hours: “Harbor automatically detects your devices via Thunderbolt 5 to form a cluster. Plug in, boot up and run – no manual setup, no command line, no infrastructure expertise required.”
• Download and run models directly: “Browse, download, and load open-weight models from within the app. Harbor handles model management so you can focus on the work, not the setup.”
• Cluster for scale: “Connect two or more Thunderbolt 5-enabled Mac computers and Harbor consolidates their unified memory into a single inference resource. Run models that exceed the capacity of any computer or process more concurrent queries on your cluster.”

Harbor is currently in private preview under the Apple Claris brand, but it seems likely that we’ll see it launched to the public in the coming weeks and months.

Do you want to use Harbor on your Mac? Let us know in the comments.

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