Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac (support.apple.com)

You can't imagine a singular person and reason who would want an improved Siri?

It's pretty nice from an app developers perspective.

It allows me to save money by calling a model on the users device rather than spending tokens (or forcing the user to spend tokens).

No, there are a tonne of Apple users that aren't developers, that will probably love this. They'll currently be using paid subscriptions to OpenAI, but only via the web app, and will happily switch to using Apple Intelligence.

I think a large part of our ecosystem is:

1. Lose the user, make him struggle to find items in the Start menu (Windows), struggle to type words on the keyboard (iOS), or struggle to manage find their subscription (Atlassian),

2. ???

3. Profit

If it's a dark pattern, I'd like to know what step 2 is. Who knows, maybe the goal is to overwhelm the user and it's a spy operation from the KGB.

I actually like AI tools, but I don’t use Apple Intelligence. It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft. They are shoving it on us when we don’t want it and it’s worse than everything else out there. It’s the Windows Media Player of the AI industry.

I don't take this abuse any longer. My last Mac is on macOS 14 and it will stay there for the remainder of its existence. I'm on Linux now and I'm not missing much compared to Mac. I'll put it this way: If a move to Apple Silicon would make me lose most of my apps anyway, then I might just as well move to an OS where I'm the boss again. Also, gaming got way better with Steam's Proton and the Heroic Game Launcher for GOG and others. I'm not going back.

>> Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.

The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.

The rounded corners you speak of also hamper tap and touch targets for users with motor disabilities. The rounded corners make icons and other elements less distinct, increasing the possibility of touch or tap errors.

Normally I'd say that's at least somewhat valid but Apple also has a nasty habit of coming up with new names for things everyone else had a name for for 30 years already. Then they do bizarre things like when I tried to help my mom with her airpod settings the other day - searching "airpod" gave no hits. I mean...what?

It (purposefully?) doesn't find everything.

For instance (this is just sequoia, but same for ios) searching for "improve" finds:

"improve assistive voice features" (I turned it off)

and diagnostic & usage data with: "improve siri & dictation" (I turned it off)

but under spotlight, it doesn't find "help apple improve search" (I turned that off too)

There are reasons graphical interfaces exist. Otherwise why don't we hide everything behind one single search box? And unless you are a die-hard Apple fan, you may not always know the correct feature name to search for.

That's putting a bandaid on an infected wound.

What have you found to be effective for you? I recently heard of this (basically Brick but open source and with any NFC tag or barcode), but I haven’t gotten a chance to test it out yet: https://www.foqos.app/

If AI/LLMs are so great, why isn't Apple using them to better organize all these settings?

I've never had Microsoft read a message, initiate an AI generation, then attempt to inject that into my conversation.

Not to say they wouldn't try...

I only saw 26 and 15 in the pulldown. Might be due to my {REDACTED} version of macOS.

Non-macOS user here. Does macOS not let you run things as root?

Is there evidence of this anywhere on the internet? I couldn't find anything with ten minutes of searching, and I don't use little snitch, and I'm not going to put the effort in to remediate this just to figure out if this comment has weight.

Well, I block all connections to iCloud for every app (user and system) completely with Little Snitch, and the fact that it does indeed break some little features I can absolutely live without, indicates that it has at least some effect.

But still, I fully share the sentiment that creators of an OS are perfectly capable of bypassing whatever there is running on top of it.

Presumably it's the LLM integrations into apps people want, not an anthropomorphized assistant

> The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke.

The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.

I think the fundamental problem is one person's "Only do the things I choose to invoke" is another person's "Why do I have to do all this stupid setup". Especially given that most people aren't computer people, and they want to use their computers to get other tasks done, not to be system administrators themselves.

Should your computer automatically build search indexes for your files? For most people, fast search is more useful than the disk space this takes up, but it would be doing something you didn't explicitly invoke.

Should your computer turn on global spell check (and even basic auto correct) for text fields? Again, you didn't invoke it explicitly, but most people probably think it's a good idea.

So you might say "well anything that just runs locally is ok" but even that's thorny. Obviously much of the AI stuff apple has been implementing is running locally and some of it has been around for a while (image classification in Photos for example). But not everyone wants the AI, even with local models.

And then there's things like "should your computer default to using NTP time?", again most people would probably say yes, especially given how important accurate time is for modern computer security. But it requires your computer doing network requests to make it work.

"Should your computer automatically check for updates?", again for most people the answer is probably "yes it should". But again it requires your computer to do network requests to make it all work.

"Should your computer automatically scan for malware?", probably yes it should, but keeping those malware lists up to date is going to require network requests and access.

There's always a tension between "being helpful and useful out of the box" and "doing stuff the OS vendor wants".

Anyone who wants an OS that does nothing out of the box is always free to grab any x86 box and install ArchLinux on it, but most people don't do that for the same reason that Spacemacs / Doom Emacs is more popular than a raw emacs install, and things like Sublime, or Notepad++ are more popular than those. Defaults matter a lot.

> Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them

Until you need to install an app through the App store. Even a free app will refuse to install without an iCloud account. Frustrating when you want something with a verified source, for me it was Wireguard, and don't want to build it locally.

The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo. Since 200gb is quite low, the next tier up is 2tb for $9.99, but then you're essentially locked in. I can't view the iCloud price tiers as anything other than predatory.

My "system data" is taking up 193 GB.

Is my Mac doing something wrong here? Anyway to see what's inside?

https://i.imgur.com/YRQiaVm.png

Realistically, the 'claim space' service needs to run when the OS 'thinks' it has run out of space to reclaim it. And there can be M amount of waiting time for this and N number of issues that may arrive with it.

In practice the difference is whether the code that does this reclaiming is actually working. I’ve never gotten my Mac into a low disk space situation (other than maybe in Leopard days) but on iOS, it is quite frequent for me to trigger a situation where the free space including purgeable space is many gigabytes but actual free space is nil. Trying to commit a transaction in a SQLite database in an app? Sorry you can’t, there’s no space left on device. Now go to settings and observe that you have 15 GB left (which includes purgeable space). Even SpringBoard has trouble showing icons. I do not trust Apple’s OS level disk space purging at all. I trust the filesystem and the storage medium more.

> Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?

It makes large allocations fail which would have otherwise succeeded.

"When you need it" is a state you can only enter into, AFAICT, when you approach the limit gradually, not abruptly.

I haven't run into this on macOS yet, but on iOS the space is not reclaimed in time to avoid running out of space even with Apple Intelligence turned off:

- Not enough space to update iOS without a computer tether, even though there would have been if that ~13GB on my phone was actually freed up. Instead I had to delete several GB on my phone.

- Recordings stopping due to lack of space, and again the 13GB LLM model on my phone was not removed before running into this.

I'm actually not where if/when I'll ever get my space back, and this is on iOS 26. It takes up even more space on iOS 27, and I don't have enough free space to waste on my 256GB phone.

Beyond the technical differences already mentioned, there's also the difference in consent. The 8-16GB of dormant AI data is either on your $2K 128GB device, or it's not.

In this regard, Apple did not learn from the free U2 album they automatically added to everyone's iTunes account at no charge.

There was enough outrage at the lack of consent in that decision, Apple had to create a special support path for removing it from accounts.

Given the divisive opinions about AI, it's odd Apple didn't include a "delete" button to completely remove it from your device if you wish.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141116221641/https%3A//support...

I'm not sure what configuration you have, but this does not send requests to Siri a-la the "cmd-cmd <type to siri>" flow.

It’s a laggy modal. For the operating system’s native-sometimes-local AI, I’d have expected something snappier.