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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
... 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This type of stuff gives me PTSD flashbacks from trying timo de-crapify Windows.
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?
Are they aware?
Even though I do use it, a choice would be nice.
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.
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
This matches my use cases. Poor speech to text recognition so I don't trust siri to do anything non-trivial
Siri was always AI, but the popular connotation of "AI" changes all the time. It now means "LLMs built with transformers."
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 use it on the desktop.
How many apple devices exist globally?
Does everyone use siri? How about keeping it opt-in?
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.
that's like one request per day per user lolol
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.
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..
Never met anyone who used siri out in public, to be honest.
You don't need to. Use the alternatives.
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.
Why should one use something adequate when something amazing exists?
Not sure what the point of this would be? Devalued street creds for running something nobody else does? Who cares?
Well, it's literally the reason Omarchy exists so some people like it...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Though what about security fixes?
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.
It keeps putting my left mounted dock on the wrong monitor for some reason. never happened before.
Lucky for us, macOS 27.2 is already in beta: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/21/apple-seeds-macos-27-2-...
macOS 15 still gets security updates.
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.
why is a local model any different than any other file they want to install with their os?
Well because it could be an extra ~20GB which is not nothing if you have a 256GB disk.
because some people don't want AI and would rather even the files were not present in their computer.
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.
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.
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
I still don't see a good reason to upgrade from Sequoia.
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.
Off topic. Since old.reddit is now login walled - is there an alternative frontend?
safereddit.com
If you are interested in read-only access pick one a Redlib instance https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
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).
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
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.
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.
Apple Intelligence is available on macOS in the EU. It's only disabled on iOS/iPadOS.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Is it able to work with non default apps like Gmail?
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.
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.
Like all macos features you used to like/depend on...
"privacy is a right"
becomes
privacy is a "defaults write <obscure-key>"
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.
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.
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.