Private AI on your Mac notch
Most AI chat tools send what you type to a company’s servers. Apple Intelligence includes a model that runs on your own Mac instead. A few apps, including PeakPad, can use it. Here’s what that means in practice.
What “on-device” means
The text you type is processed by a model stored and run on your Mac. It doesn’t need an internet connection to answer, and there’s no server on the other end receiving your question.
What Ask Peak does with it
Ask Peak is the chat tab in PeakPad. Open the notch, pick Ask Peak and type. It’s good for rewriting a sentence in a friendlier tone, summarizing something you pasted, quick maths, or a first draft. PeakPad shows “On-device · private” at the top and doesn’t save your conversations. New chat clears the current one.
See the Ask Peak page for the details.
What you need
- macOS 26 or later.
- A Mac that supports Apple Intelligence, with it turned on.
If your Mac doesn’t meet this, PeakPad hides the Ask Peak tab. Every other tool works on macOS 14.6 or later.
What it can’t do
An on-device model is smaller than the large models behind cloud chatbots. It’s a good fit for short, everyday tasks. For long research, very recent news or complex multi-step work, a cloud tool will usually do better. Ask Peak doesn’t browse the web.
Why it matters
If you’re working with a draft contract, a private message or customer details, there’s a real difference between “processed on my Mac” and “sent to a server”. For those moments, on-device is the safer default.
Not every PeakPad tool is offline: Weather, Stocks, currency rates and lyrics fetch data from the internet, and Revenue and Analytics talk to the services you connect. The privacy page lists exactly what connects where.