Apple Silicon gets on-device omni-modal search with omni-macos
Researcher builds a privacy-first search engine that runs entirely on your Mac
Independent researcher Han Xiao has developed omni-macos, a groundbreaking on-device search engine designed to run entirely on Apple Silicon Macs without ever sending files, queries, or vectors to external servers.
The system integrates a background indexer and interactive search interface within a single memory budget. It intelligently manages computational resources by re-encoding only modified content, processing smaller data units during user input, and using quantized replicas for efficient querying. Tested across five Macs with diverse hardware configurations (spanning 8x accelerator width and 32x memory range), the engine maintains consistent performance by dynamically allocating unified memory resources based on user settings.
- omni-macos performs omni-modal search (text, code, images, audio, video) entirely on-device on Apple Silicon Macs
- System dynamically manages GPU/memory resources, re-encodes only changed content, and uses quantized replicas for efficient querying
- Tested successfully across five Macs with 8x accelerator width and 32x memory range variations
Why It Matters
Privacy-focused search without cloud dependency for professionals handling sensitive data locally.