For Apple silicon Macs
Image generation that never leaves your Mac.
Silo Studio runs open-weight image models locally, through Apple’s MLX. There is no account and no server: your prompts and your pictures stay on the machine that made them.
Requires macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon.
What it does
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account, no sign-in, no server. Models run locally through Apple's MLX, and every image you make is a file in your own library. There is no analytics, no crash reporting and no telemetry of any kind.
You choose the models
Silo ships with no weights at all. Setup shows you a short list of open-weight models and downloads only the ones you leave ticked — you can decline every one and add them later.
Fast on the first try
The recommended first download is Z-Image Turbo, about 3.6 GB and Apache-2.0 licensed. It produces an image in roughly ten seconds on Apple silicon, with no Hugging Face account needed.
One button, the right path
The composer has a single action. With nothing attached it generates from your text; attach a picture and it edits or varies it, depending on what the chosen model can actually do.
Styles, upscaling, references
LoRA styles, multi-reference edits and 2x or 3x upscaling are all there when the model you picked supports them — and clearly unavailable, with a reason, when it does not.
An assistant that writes prompts
Ask for a look and the assistant drafts the prompt. It runs on Apple's on-device language model, or on an MLX language model you import from your own disk.
About the 18+ rating
Silo Studio runs open-weight models that are not filtered, so a user can generate adult imagery. That is why the app is rated 18+. Two safeguards are always present:
- Prompts asking for sexual imagery of minors are refused. The check runs before anything is queued and there is no setting to turn it off.
- Finished images are screened on-device by Apple’s Sensitive Content Analysis framework. Flagged pictures are covered behind a Show control — never deleted, and every export still works. This is on by default and relies on macOS’s own Sensitive Content Warning setting.
Requirements
- Operating system
- macOS 26 or later
- Hardware
- Apple silicon
- Disk space
- About 4 GB for the first model
The app itself is small; the space it needs depends entirely on how many models you choose to keep. You can delete any of them from inside the app and the disk space comes straight back.