macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage (reddit.com)

196 pointsby ano-ther8 hours ago89 comments

hbn 5 hours ago

I'll say they definitely need to let people disable/offload the model, but if you haven't tried the new Siri, it's been great. Obviously it's not a state of the art LLM, but it's good enough, and the fact that it can search and take actions on your local data makes it incredibly useful. I definitely use it more on my iPhone where it's slower to get things done the traditional way, but I use it all the time now.

"What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.

The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.

Since learning Spanish I get a lot more Spanish stuff in my feeds, and if I e.g. don't understand a meme I'll just ask "explain the joke here" and it reads the screen and explains it.

You can have an article open in Safari and say "remind me to read this tonight" and it'll make a reminder with the link. Or you can modify reminders - "move my reminder to get groceries to tomorrow at the same time". Yesterday I told it to make me a reminder and it did, but I worded it in a clunky way so I followed it with "reword that to sound more natural" and it did it.

We've been trained for a long time to think Siri can't do anything but I urge you to try it once you're on the new one, it's quite good. And I'm sure I've barely touched all the things it can do. David Pogue published a pretty thorough test other day:

https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri

alwillis 4 hours ago

Posted: "Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790409

Not a bad list from Apple.

alwillis 4 hours ago

A couple of things I've done with Apple Intelligence on the Mac:

* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.

* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.

Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.

vinni2 3 hours ago

Not sure if I want Siri to know my prescription medication.

alwillis an hour ago

> Not sure if I want Siri to know my prescription medication.

Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.

There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:

    We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about
    the way it handles user data [1]:
    
    A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of
    fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to
    perform the operations requested by the user. User data stays on the
    PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is
    returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request,
    and no user data is retained in any form after the response is
    returned. User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with
    administrative access to the production service or hardware.

[1]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

vinni2 an hour ago

I am sorry no amount of assurances from any company is going to make me reveal my medical information to products from any tech company.

hbn 3 hours ago

The Apple Intelligence Shortcuts creation is great as well. I never had a desire to learn their visual programming language so I mostly ignored Shortcuts. Now it's one-shot some really handy utilities for me.

Merad 3 hours ago

Is it able to work with non default apps like Gmail?

hbn 3 hours ago

Not the Gmail app, but a Gmail account, yes. You have to at least have the default Mail app installed and signed in for it to be able to index the emails.

nunez 3 hours ago

Siri AI is very capable, but *I* should have control over when and whether *I* decide to enable or completely delete it.

I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.

(You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)

Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.

m463 2 hours ago

Like all macos features you used to like/depend on...

"privacy is a right"

becomes

privacy is a "defaults write <obscure-key>"

lynndotpy 11 minutes ago

[delayed]

lynndotpy 19 minutes ago

Our experiences diverge surprisingly far. The new Siri was worse for everything I use it for before I turned it off.

The new Siri can not reliably return the weather (it seems it's prompting on the literal text of the town and asks for a clarification sometimes about whether I am in the United States or United Kingdom), and when I ask "what is the air quality index", the new Siri would sometimes return the definition of AQI. When it returns a value, new Siri would hallucinate an incorrect and fixed value. In the cases where it does work, it's very much slower than the classic "rainbow orb" Siri.

jleehn 2 hours ago

Tangentially related, I've always been frustrated by Apple's refusal to allow sorting photos/videos by file size. It feels like a blatant push to force users towards paying for their cloud storage.

bdavbdav 25 minutes ago

Not ideal, but their disk space recovery thing in settings can do I believe.

happyopossum an hour ago

Worth pointing out that the Foundational Models can be used by more than just Siri - apps, shortcuts, etc can call/run those models for local inference.

jtbayly 6 hours ago

Yeah, I’ll wait to update my computers until Apple gives us an actual choice.

wahnfrieden 6 hours ago

Time to permanently offboard from Apple ecosystem then

jtbayly 6 hours ago

Perhaps eventually. I know I’m in a “closed ecosystem,” and that removes a fair bit of choice in a variety of places. But Apple is known to walk bad decisions back at times. This update is an example, with liquid glass. Another recent one was the iCloud private email planned domain change being scrapped.

wahnfrieden 5 hours ago

Liquid Glass was rushed out because their flagship WWDC feature, Apple Intelligence, wasn’t ready as expected. They knew they didn’t finish refining Glass as they had intended to. They had unfinished work with Glass that got pushed to this year due to the last minute change in direction. The refinements we got weren’t only the product of feedback and they already intended to revisit the design.

This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.

If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.

bee_rider 4 hours ago

I mean they added a slider to make Liquid Glass slightly less bad, but the “good” end is just the old “reduce transparency” option. They’ve got a lot of progress to make, if they are ever going to give us back the pre-liquid-glass UI density.

worldsavior 6 hours ago

Though what about security fixes?

kristofferR 5 hours ago

macOS 27 is way faster and more stable than macOS 26 though, so unless you are on an ancient version it doesn't make sense to not upgrade.

CodingJeebus 5 hours ago

I've hit some really weird window/workspace UI bugs so far in MacOS27. It's not no-brainer update yet, IMO.

platevoltage 3 hours ago

It keeps putting my left mounted dock on the wrong monitor for some reason. never happened before.

alwillis 3 hours ago

> I've hit some really weird window/workspace UI bugs so far in MacOS27.

Lucky for us, macOS 27.2 is already in beta: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/21/apple-seeds-macos-27-2-...

seam_carver 5 hours ago

macOS 15 still gets security updates.

jtbayly 4 hours ago

On one of my machines, I don’t know if I could even make it fit. So it’s a no-brainer to not update on that one, if they are going to force an extra 14GB download on me.

compiler-guy 33 minutes ago

Being short on disk space is a pretty good reason to not upgrade.

I would rather keep my personal picture library on my local disk (with backups, of course) than gigabytes and gigabytes of Apple models.

They were the ones who thought that 256Gb was a reasonable number. And it actually did work pretty well, until they wanted to fill it with models.

sleepybrett 5 hours ago

why is a local model any different than any other file they want to install with their os?

hbn 5 hours ago

Well because it could be an extra ~20GB which is not nothing if you have a 256GB disk.

soapdog 5 hours ago

because some people don't want AI and would rather even the files were not present in their computer.

compiler-guy 31 minutes ago

I do want (some, carefully curated as to certain usecases) AI. But I don't want to waste my diskspace for this AI.

njovin 5 hours ago

It's 14GB of something I don't want, need, nor have any use for, on a machine that is notorious for making storage upgrades difficult.

SkyeCA 3 hours ago

By that logic why not fill the hard drive with OS data? This is a company mind you that still sells some laptops with a base configuration of 256GB, so 10-20GB isn't an insignificant amount to many users especially when it's taken by a feature they may not even use.

alwillis 3 hours ago

Friendly reminder:

Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.

For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.

It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!

Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.

The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.

[1]: https://cotypist.app

[2]: https://github.com/powtac/wtm

drooopy 4 hours ago

I still don't see a good reason to upgrade from Sequoia.

plutokras 4 hours ago

I was skipping Tahoe too after seeing all those posts about the differently rounded corners.

This time I took the plunge and upgraded, and I have to admit the whole system, especially Safari is much more snappy than before.

ebtebt 5 hours ago

How much storage does this save?

CharlesW 5 hours ago

Interestingly, Siri AI was able to answer this with a reference: Up to 14 GB. https://imgur.com/a/SZGh1ca

iAMkenough 4 hours ago

That's not a reliable source or reference. Read the disclaimer at the bottom.

CharlesW 4 hours ago

Yes, I'd sanity-checked the answer on my machine, which is 15.5 GB on iOS 27.2: https://imgur.com/a/XVT8rme

Not all of the space used by Apple Intelligence is downloaded model size, which explains the reasonable difference.

iAMkenough 4 hours ago

Your reality is yours, not mine. https://imgur.com/a/3viouLd

I'm not upset, just pointing out TweakTown gave Apple's AI misleading information about Apple's products. You might have 30GB of wasted space on your 128GB drive due to Apple Intelligence features on your Mac (like me).

CharlesW 4 hours ago

Apologies, I didn't mean to upset you. Per the title I was talking about the downloaded core model sizes, which are a bit under 8 GB or 14 GB in OS 27 depending on device: https://support.apple.com/en-us/121115

alwillis 4 hours ago

> That's not a reliable source or reference. Read the disclaimer at the bottom.

The "Always verify important details. Siri is an Al that may make mistakes." is the new version of "your mileage may vary".

Also, I get a similar message when using Gemini, OpenAI and Claude.

I own a "Standard iPhone" and an M1 Mac; these numbers track.

VCFundedGenYer an hour ago

LLMs are not sources.

fuu_dev 5 hours ago

Apple intelligence is listed as 29 GB in the Storage settings. Which should be the amount of space you get back.

MacOS 27 is also diffrent in that it does still downloads the data for EU users and removes or hides options in menues to dissable functionality. This means users lose the said space when upgrading to 27.

fundatus 5 hours ago

Apple Intelligence is available on macOS in the EU. It's only disabled on iOS/iPadOS.

5555watch 2 hours ago

If Siri and Apple Intelligence is disabled in the settings, does it still do the download?

lotsofpulp 7 hours ago

This type of stuff gives me PTSD flashbacks from trying timo de-crapify Windows.

VCFundedGenYer 4 hours ago

They need an option to completely disable and delete Apple Intelligence.

A 256GB Mac Mini is effectively unable to use macOS 27 due to this bloated nonsense.

viccis 4 hours ago

Yeah I use my 256gb Mac Mini for iOS dev, which has always had enough space for an iPad and iPhone simulator with plenty to spare, but this eats way into that.

thih9 6 hours ago

Off topic. Since old.reddit is now login walled - is there an alternative frontend?

thescriptkiddie 6 hours ago

safereddit.com

wrxd 6 hours ago

If you are interested in read-only access pick one a Redlib instance https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...

VCFundedGenYer 4 hours ago

Use "Old Reedit Redirect" for Firefox - it still lets you in without a login.

thisislife2 6 minutes ago

If you meant this extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... - it doesn't work. I still get the javascript crappified "new" Reddit.

thewhitetulip 7 hours ago

I am tired to fight against every platform that I have to use

De macify Mac Degoogle Android Demacify ipad DeLLM chrome browsers local llm

Can we expect sane decisions from corpos about what we want rather than what latest thing they want to push on us?

jhack 7 hours ago

Apple says their users make 2.5B Siri requests per day. Sounds like people want it?

Hodgewocket 7 hours ago

Are they aware?

moribvndvs 7 hours ago

Even though I do use it, a choice would be nice.

GuinansEyebrows 6 hours ago

i wonder how many of them are like 100% of my requests?

- "set a timer for 14 minutes"

- "remind me to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow at noon"

- "turn off the bedroom lights"

that don't require any form of AI and have functioned perfectly well (aside from having a hard time when i mumble) for years on non-AI versions of Siri?

thewebguyd 6 hours ago

I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.

anamexis 6 hours ago

I think you're going to need some kind of ML to turn that question into a structured search, and interpret the results.

regenschutz 5 hours ago

Not necessarily. NLP is possible to do without any ML. See ELIZA [0] as an example, which used pattern matching and substitution to process natural language. A few simple rules can cover a majority of requests. It's still AI, but not ML.

Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

exographicskip 6 hours ago

This matches my use cases. Poor speech to text recognition so I don't trust siri to do anything non-trivial

dreamcompiler 5 hours ago

Siri was always AI, but the popular connotation of "AI" changes all the time. It now means "LLMs built with transformers."

tiborsaas 6 hours ago

Do they have a breakdown for platforms? iOS vs. macOS, I'd bet most of it is iOS.

I don't have Siri enabled, I've never felt the need for it on desktop.

nozzlegear 4 hours ago

I use it on the desktop.

thewhitetulip 6 hours ago

How many apple devices exist globally?

Does everyone use siri? How about keeping it opt-in?

javier2 6 hours ago

I dont even have Siri enabled, but even less so on macOS.

a1o 5 hours ago

If you have a car you are forced to because you can’t use Apple Car Play if you don’t enable Siri.

I also don’t use but I have to have it enabled to be able to use Google Maps, and Siri occasionally mistakes a conversation for being invited to listen and speak.

cromulent 2 hours ago

Curious. I have Siri turned off (just checked again) and I use Apple CarPlay daily. Maybe an EU thing.

officeplant an hour ago

>you can’t use Apple Car Play if you don’t enable Siri.

It works for me, but I'm using wired carplay on an iphone 11 w/ios27. (In the US, Swapped to Siri Classic, then disabled it.)

Looking around online it seems doing it wired can bypass the Siri requirement. Which may work in my case because in the Ford headunit I can force wireless projection to be off and blocked (including turning off the wifi for the headunit). So some cars might be forcing wireless Carplay and triggering the Siri requirement.

mathisfun123 5 hours ago

> 2.5B Siri requests per day

that's like one request per day per user lolol

pesus 5 hours ago

I get forced to use it While using CarPlay. I don't particularly want it, though, considering it still regularly fails at basic tasks like adding the currently playing song to a playlist.

vitalrune 5 hours ago

The issue it's they make it very hard to remove it to clear the space used by it, i think you got to boot into recovery mode and do some risky crap, my macbook is almost out of space just from development cache..

drooopy 4 hours ago

Never met anyone who used siri out in public, to be honest.

quaddoggy an hour ago

Timers. Easily >50% of these requests are people setting timers.

basisword 6 hours ago

You don't need to. Use the alternatives.

ezst 6 hours ago

KDE. KDE is all you need.

Ginger-Pickles 6 hours ago

One arguably don’t even need KDE any more; the coding models will throw together a perfectly adequate desktop environment.

regenschutz 5 hours ago

Why should one use something adequate when something amazing exists?

ezst 5 hours ago

Not sure what the point of this would be? Devalued street creds for running something nobody else does? Who cares?

bitwize 4 hours ago

Well, it's literally the reason Omarchy exists so some people like it...

agoodusername63 6 hours ago

no. buy a linux compatible laptop and deal with the UX downgrade.

drooopy 4 hours ago

What downgrade? A typical Gnome desktop is far more coherent than Windows or even macOS in some regards these days.

hattar 4 hours ago

There are definitely some cool features missing, but I'd take KDE over any other window manager without a second thought if it were possible.

kotaKat 5 hours ago

without a reddit account:

... can you also force Siri off by using Screen Time controls? I noticed that in the Screen Time menus, "Content and Privacy" restrictions can be toggled on. From there seems to be an additional "Siri" menu that lets me change the allowed Siri version from Siri Classic to Siri AI as well as options to turn off the global writing tools/assistance (which turns off the annoying Siri bubble on every textbox now).

I suspect forcing Siri off via those controls would work easier than using Low Data Mode or trying to force Siri to disable via language selection.