# Apple SHARP

30 Hacker News commenters recommended Apple SHARP and 16 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fast, free model that turns one photo into a 3D view in seconds, good for small side-to-side motion. Critics say it breaks down on larger camera moves and inpainting.

## Why people recommend it

- Reliable image resizing and processing library (5 comments): "Been using this forever in CloudFront behaviors to auto-resize images." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336645)) "Sharp (the Node.js libvips binding) is surprisingly good for this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120788)) "Great library to have at hand when you need to deal with images." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334932))
- Fast, even on CPU (4 comments): "Apple's Sharp is awesome in that it is fast, but it only generates a small depth sample from the image." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999648)) "This software does that in less than a second, creating a 3D model that can be accurately moved" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285370)) "Works great, model file is 2.8 GB, on M2 rendering took a few seconds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285512))
- Easy to run locally (2 comments): "It's pretty trivial to get running locally and generating the PLY files." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560874)) "one of the easiest AI repos to get running" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294124))
- Good for side-to-side 3D motion (2 comments): "It falls apart once you move too much, but for a little side-wiggling or a second-eye view for VR, it's great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193789)) "This is great for turning a photo into a dynamic-IPD stereo pair" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285133))

## What people warn about

- Weak depth; results below demo (5 comments): "the results were nowhere close to the results in the demo" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996007)) "It doesn't quite get the depth right in anything, and the edges of things look off." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285261)) "Apple's Sharp is awesome in that it is fast, but it only generates a small depth sample from the image." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999648))
- Fails on inpainting and angled views (2 comments): "It's interesting how it fails in the section where you need to in-paint." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285103)) "because this does not do any angled inpainting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403413))
- Research-only license, not open source (4 comments): "There's no reason to believe that weights are copyrightable. The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46402324)) "It effectively prevents the community from using Apple's solution" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403478)) ""Exclusively for research purposes" so not actually open source." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46402320))
- Crashes or high memory use (3 comments): "Loading the model crashes my browser tab from memory usage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996708)) "It froze up my computer, had to hard-boot lol" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999843)) "often a redeploy that recompiled Sharp just crashed the full VM (out of memory)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357609))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Apple SHARP", https://hackerapproved.com/p/sharp/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).