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?

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

KDE. KDE is all you need.

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

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

If you’re gonna use KDE, just go with Windows. Same UI paradigm and, surprisingly, Windows looks better (that’s how bad KDE looks).

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

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

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

Time to permanently offboard from Apple ecosystem then

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.

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.

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

macOS 15 still gets security updates.

Calling something cutting edge one year ago “ancient” is absolutely wild. To me that word means, like, pre Apple Silicon.

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

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

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

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

safereddit.com

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

How much storage does this save?

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

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

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.

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).

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.

LLMs are not sources.

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.

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

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.

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

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/

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.

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.

Unlike your insurance provider or credit card company, which keep your prescription details, Apple Intelligence deletes the data once you receive a response—a fact Apple could verify if necessary.

It appears I did not need the cloud; my prescription information stayed on my iPhone to create the request, thanks to the Apple Foundation models running locally.

Luckily I live in a country with universal healthcare and our pharmacies don’t transmit prescription medication info to credit cards. They just show some prescription medication was purchased

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

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.

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

You mean the way that takes 20x as long?

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.

"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.

Where you see convenience, I see a security nightmare.

How? It's all on machine. Which is the point.

He says, browsing the Internet, probably with a Google account.

(Whispering) multiple things can, in fact, be bad

(speaking normally, as this is the internet and not an orchestra) No one said, in fact, that they couldn’t

I get that these are things you might do regularly and feel more empowered to use Siri for them... but they're rather banal and could be done with literally a one or two step process previously, especially if you're already using Apple's first-party apps which seem to be a requirement here. In both email cases, Spotlight handles searches like that just fine, and moving a calendar event only requires clicking and dragging.

I'm here wondering why so much extra space is warranted, or how to take it back, not so much how I can find a document with specific text in it or use Siri to do something else that was already very easy.

One task I'm wondering about is for example, asking Siri (on the mac) to analyze a huge dump of arbitrary PDFs that may or may not have non-OCRed text in them, and efficiently reorg and rename them based on what the documents should be. This also seems like a mundane task, but requires a little more than just a standard search and would allow someone to take their entire paper archive of private business documents and create a digital archive without too much risk or work. This is something that all local models I've tried so far really struggle with.

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.

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.