Apple ships AI writing tools free with macOS. So when is it worth paying $19 for something else? Here's the honest answer.
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 15.1+ and you only need occasional proofreading, Apple Intelligence is free and good enough — use it. Choose Gist if you're on an Intel Mac (where Apple Intelligence doesn't run at all), or if you want your own custom prompts, control over which model runs, voice dictation, or results sent straight into Obsidian, Bear or Notes.
It's free, it's already installed, and there's nothing to set up. For "fix the grammar in this paragraph", it does the job without you thinking about it. It's integrated at the OS level, so it appears in the standard text context menu everywhere Apple's text engine is used. And Apple's privacy engineering around Private Cloud Compute is genuinely serious work.
If that covers your needs, you don't need this page and you don't need Gist. We'd rather say so than waste your $19.
This is the big one. Apple Intelligence requires macOS 15.1 or later and an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). If you're on a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro or a 2018 Mac mini, it is simply not available to you — no upgrade path short of new hardware. Gist requires macOS 14 and runs on Intel and Apple Silicon alike.
Apple gives you a fixed menu: Proofread, Rewrite, Friendly, Professional, Concise, Summary, Key Points, List, Table. Useful, but you can't add to it. Gist lets you type any one-off instruction, and save the ones you repeat as templates that show up in the palette — "rewrite this as a Jira ticket", "reply declining politely", "translate to German and keep the tone".
Apple decides what runs and where. Gist ships a free on-device model that works offline, and if you want a frontier model for the hard stuff you add your own OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter key and pay them directly, at cost. Nothing routes through our servers either way.
macOS dictation transcribes what you said. Gist transcribes it and then turns the rambling spoken version into a finished draft — one shortcut, no retyping.
Summarise an article and send it straight to Obsidian, Bear or Notes without touching the clipboard. Apple Intelligence leaves the result in the text field.
| Gist | Apple Intelligence | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | Free |
| Minimum macOS | 14 (Sonoma) | 15.1 (Sequoia) |
| Intel Mac support | Yes | No — Apple Silicon only |
| Custom prompts | Unlimited, saveable | Fixed menu |
| Choose your model | On-device or your own API key | Apple decides |
| Fully offline | Yes, on-device model | Partly — heavier requests use Private Cloud Compute |
| Voice → polished draft | Yes | Transcription only |
| Send to Obsidian / Bear / Notes | Yes | No |
| Works in Electron apps | Yes, via Accessibility + clipboard fallback | Inconsistent outside native text views |
Both are credible here, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Apple runs simple requests on-device and routes heavier ones to Private Cloud Compute, which Apple states is never stored or accessible to them. That's a stronger guarantee than most cloud AI offers.
The difference is verifiability. Gist's bundled model runs entirely on your machine, and you can prove it in five seconds: turn off your Wi-Fi and it still works. For work under an NDA, that distinction sometimes matters — and if you add your own API key, Gist behaves like any cloud tool and we say so plainly.
Every feature, 7 days, no account and no card. If Apple Intelligence turns out to be enough for you, just delete it.
↓ Download for Mac — 4 MBmacOS 14+ · Intel & Apple Silicon · Signed & notarised by Apple