LM Studio

LM Studio is the app that brought local AI out of the terminal and into a proper desktop experience. While tools like Ollama let you pull and run models from the command line, LM Studio wraps the entire workflow—discovering models, downloading them, chatting with them, and serving them as an API—into a clean desktop GUI that feels like a native Mac application. The core appeal is the built-in model browser. Instead of trawling Hugging Face repositories to figure out which GGUF file to download and whether it'll fit in your RAM, LM Studio lets you search, filter, and download models directly from the app. It shows you the model size, quantization level, required RAM, and community ratings. Click download, wait for the progress bar, and start chatting. No terminal, no file paths, no quantization math. On Apple Silicon Macs, LM Studio uses the MLX backend (Apple's machine learning framework) for GPU-accelerated inference. This means models run on the Metal GPU cores in your M-series chip, delivering 30-80 tokens per second depending on model size and your hardware. The app also exposes an OpenAI-compatible local server, so you can use LM Studio as a backend for Cursor, Continue.dev, LangChain, or any tool that speaks the OpenAI API. For developers who want to experiment with local LLMs without memorizing CLI commands, and for teams that need a visual way to evaluate different models, LM Studio is the obvious starting point.