Apple’s Claris subsidiary, the FileMaker folks, is testing an app called Harbor that “turns your Mac into a private AI inference server,” according to MacRumors and 9to5Mac, citing leaker Aaron Perris.
- It runs open-weight models locally on Apple silicon: “your data never leaves your hardware.”
- Connect two or more Thunderbolt 5 Macs and Harbor pools their unified memory into one inference resource, using the RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 that Apple added in macOS Tahoe 26.2. That lets you run bigger models or serve more requests at once.
- It detects the cluster on its own, and you browse and download models inside the app: “no manual configuration, no command line.”
- It’s in early access. A brief App Store listing has been pulled.
My take
I’ve been doing this the hard way with Ollama and llama.cpp, so a first-party “plug in two Mac Studios and go” app gets my attention. Claris is an odd home for it, though, and until it actually ships, treat it as a leak and not a product.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
