Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?
The storage medium tracks whether a cell or sector is overwritable. The filesystem tracks whether a block is allocated. And the OS tracks whether a cache is evictable.
At what layer do you consider the space “claimed”?
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.
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.
Funny how Apple has reached the crapware maturity level that Microsoft users are quite familiar with: After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
I'd expect turning off Siri as a whole, which is very easy, would be enough. The list is for people who still want to use Siri after it became a OS-level LLM, I mean, Apple Intelligence.
It's the "agency" bit that really annoys me. The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke. It should not do a laundry list of things that the device manufacturer wants it to do, nor a laundry list of things the OS vendor wants it to do. I shouldn't have to turn things off. They shouldn't be on to begin with, unless I deliberately turned them on.
Of course this doesn't extend to obvious things like "running the kernel" and "initializing the filesystem." But in general I want to be the person responsible for running things, not some product manager 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, whatever happened to the personal computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something you own and can direct towards your goals and wellbeing?
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
The difference is that you can actually not set these things up: with Windows you often have to choice. Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them, whereas to avoid a Microsoft cloud account there are magic CLI incantations that have to be invoked. And once you say "no", Apple generally leaves you alone.
I don't mind a bit of 'upsell' or informing (new) users of available offerings, as long as I get a choice.
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.
The thing that's weird about Apple's "Intelligence" features is how dumb they are. I messaged one of my kids yesterday that the pizza I made was ready and that I was out in the backyard with our dogs. Genmoji (or whatever it's called) then decided to suggest that I make a new Emoji with pizzas in a yard.
It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Is it possible to block Apple Intelligence from sending data over the Internet via Little Snitch? I would assume it is, but I'm not sure if anything significant has changed in macOS 27 that makes this impossible now. I don't really mind the local features - I'd rather they stay disabled, but it's not the end of the world - but I really don't want any data leaving my Mac.
You can verify this yourself. Get an old laptop to act as a wifi hotspot and forward traffic over usb ethernet adapter to your actual router. Then run tcpdump on the computer. You will see the multitude of phone-home traffic.
What is "root" in macOS is more or less a power user role. Apple took away the true ability to operate as root a long time ago with System Integrity Protection which walls off the critical parts of the OS from the user entirely.
Unfortunately, SIP also restricts basic system functions that are trivial in other OSes. Apple made this very difficult, and MS would have loved to do this in Vista had they not received the backlash that they did.
You can disable SIP if you want. You can run whatever you want on your machine. Disabling SIP is indeed a security risk… then again, so is running something as root. Having a Mac w/o SIP is no more a security risk than having a Linux w/o a r/o kernel AFAIK.
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.
As it turned out, this behavior is on purpose. There’s an explicit whitelist that allows certain macOS services to bypass any third party firewalls and to communicate on the Internet without being even noticed by the user. A hole in the wall.
Was remediated later, but shows there is precedent.
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's not something macOS can or wants to bypass.
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.
Before, it was ⌘⌘ and you could type out something for Siri to fuck up. Now, we have to turn off “Hey Siri” and then click on the Siri app or meander our way through Spotlight.
It does as long as you've typed something that doesn't match an app. "Safari" and enter will open Safari. "What is safari" and enter will ask Siri the question and show the answer.
Clearly, nobody at Apple is thinking globally about this stuff.
If you have kids, "Screen Time" is a reasonable enough name for the place where parental controls live.
If you work under the assumption that AI features are OK in general, but potentially problematic around kids in particular, parental controls are a reasonable enough place to put these AI controls.
If you're not a parent, and have broader concerns about AI, you'd never even think of looking for these options where they are.
As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to configure my iOS/Mac experience to be more intentional/less addictive, I am intimately familiar with Screen Time at this point. And my gut says this isn't an oversight on Apple's part at all.
This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
It's very weird that these aren't in the already existing top level "Siri" or "Privacy & Security" settings tabs. Apple has had a problem for a while now where it seems like they just don't know what they want to do with the settings app, and like you said, doesn't have anyone in charge of the "global" view of the settings. Why are, "Appearance", "Desktop & Dock" and "Wallpaper" all different top level items? Why are "Wi-Fi" and "Network" different top level items? Why is "Battery" top level, but "Time Machine" and "Sharing" and "Date & Time" are all under "General"? Why is "Autofill & Passwords" under general and not "Privacy & Security"?
It's really frustrating that there is no ability to reclaim the drive space in MacOS 27, especially on Macbooks with M1 or M2 chips that can barely use the models. Another great sign of how the OS is deeply on fire IMO.
You can’t determine what is taking up space on your iPhone in the “system data” or “Other” section in iOS. The only way to “reduce” it is to restore and wipe the phone.
Missing from Apple's list is the feature that suggest filenames.
At first, it was very cool and did a good job with plain text files, and even a PDF. Then it munged the names of several hundred files I was working with that was each named with a street address.
I will never touch this garbage and would rather use the disk space I purchased to be used for my purposes, not the industry's pointless fad bubble endeavors.
Absolutely 100%. Now I'm very biased against this "AI" stuff in general, but even fans of "AI" can't want this, right? I mean I know some people who are heavy "AI" users and they all either have a setup with Cursor/Codex/Zed/VSCode/whatever or their preferred local model, they'd never ever want to use "whatever Apple happens to ship with the OS". Same with the model Google bundled into their browser, growing Chrome from roughly 200MB to over 4GB. Who's the target audience here?
The selling point is being able to say things like "remind me about the next early release from school the night before" and it'll dig up the info from your emails and then create the reminder.
And people really trust the bot to do that stuff for them? They risk letting down their kid by not being there to pick them up just to save half a minute of finding the right email? That sounds crazy to me, creating a reminder isn't exactly hard
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.
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 would never have figured out the toggle for writing tools is in `Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Siri -> Writing Assistance`
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?
Searching for "airpod" in settings brings up -
Accessibility, "Headphones/AirPods/Beats", Conversation Boost, Noise Cancellation, Press and hold duration, Press speed, Transparency mode
Not sure what went wrong for you, these results seem pretty much on point.
This literally happened yesterday. It tried to bring me to a safari search and I got no other hits. Could've been just a buggy moment with search who knows.
The Write with Siri button that shows up whenever I select text is so obnoxious that I want to trash this fucking machine after 30+ years on the platform.
This applies to MacOS 26.
On iOS 27, it looks like changing the settings for eight different apps taking 5 or 6 steps each.
https://archive.ph/AE72I#selection-712.0-731.53
Original: https://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-turn-off-apple-intelligenc...
Select the version from the pulldown menu at the top left of the screen.
Note that storage space taken up by local models is not reclaimed and remains dormant on your Mac until you're nearly out of space.
They cant take up that free space if it was already full in the first place..
Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?
The storage medium tracks whether a cell or sector is overwritable. The filesystem tracks whether a block is allocated. And the OS tracks whether a cache is evictable.
At what layer do you consider the space “claimed”?
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.
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.
Funny how Apple has reached the crapware maturity level that Microsoft users are quite familiar with: After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
I'd expect turning off Siri as a whole, which is very easy, would be enough. The list is for people who still want to use Siri after it became a OS-level LLM, I mean, Apple Intelligence.
It's the "agency" bit that really annoys me. The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke. It should not do a laundry list of things that the device manufacturer wants it to do, nor a laundry list of things the OS vendor wants it to do. I shouldn't have to turn things off. They shouldn't be on to begin with, unless I deliberately turned them on.
Of course this doesn't extend to obvious things like "running the kernel" and "initializing the filesystem." But in general I want to be the person responsible for running things, not some product manager 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley.
The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.
Yeah, whatever happened to the personal computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something you own and can direct towards your goals and wellbeing?
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
The difference is that you can actually not set these things up: with Windows you often have to choice. Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them, whereas to avoid a Microsoft cloud account there are magic CLI incantations that have to be invoked. And once you say "no", Apple generally leaves you alone.
I don't mind a bit of 'upsell' or informing (new) users of available offerings, as long as I get a choice.
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.
That's on Wireguard.
If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
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.
Sounds like the issue is you.
Oh, c'mon. The entire services division exists to sell you things like this. And they are very good at it - 25% of Apple's total revenue
Comparing apple intelligence to a service that records your screen without consent feels extremely disingenuous.
The thing that's weird about Apple's "Intelligence" features is how dumb they are. I messaged one of my kids yesterday that the pizza I made was ready and that I was out in the backyard with our dogs. Genmoji (or whatever it's called) then decided to suggest that I make a new Emoji with pizzas in a yard.
It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Still better then Microsoft.
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...
They’re too busy taking screenshots of your desktop every 2 seconds to datamine your interests in order to sell ads injected into the start menu.
Many bothans died to bring you that suggestion to make a new emoji of pizzas in a yard.
It's the price you pay for privacy
Mmm, freshly grown yard pizzas, just like AI ~~used to~~ currently makes.
Is it possible to block Apple Intelligence from sending data over the Internet via Little Snitch? I would assume it is, but I'm not sure if anything significant has changed in macOS 27 that makes this impossible now. I don't really mind the local features - I'd rather they stay disabled, but it's not the end of the world - but I really don't want any data leaving my Mac.
Apple OS will bypass any user space firewall.
You can verify this yourself. Get an old laptop to act as a wifi hotspot and forward traffic over usb ethernet adapter to your actual router. Then run tcpdump on the computer. You will see the multitude of phone-home traffic.
Non-macOS user here. Does macOS not let you run things as root?
It does let you run things as root.
Not exactly.
What is "root" in macOS is more or less a power user role. Apple took away the true ability to operate as root a long time ago with System Integrity Protection which walls off the critical parts of the OS from the user entirely.
Unfortunately, SIP also restricts basic system functions that are trivial in other OSes. Apple made this very difficult, and MS would have loved to do this in Vista had they not received the backlash that they did.
You can disable SIP if you want. You can run whatever you want on your machine. Disabling SIP is indeed a security risk… then again, so is running something as root. Having a Mac w/o SIP is no more a security risk than having a Linux w/o a r/o kernel AFAIK.
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.
Probably referring to https://www.obdev.at/blog/a-hole-in-the-wall - as of 2020
Was remediated later, but shows there is precedent.
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's not something macOS can or wants to bypass.
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.
Is it possible to block Apple Intelligence from sending data over the Internet via Little Snitch?
Short answer: Maybe, but I've never tried it.
Little Snitch is aware of various system-level network connections, but I don't know if they're granular enough to block the AI only.
Why did they nerf the keyboard interface to Siri?
Before, it was ⌘⌘ and you could type out something for Siri to fuck up. Now, we have to turn off “Hey Siri” and then click on the Siri app or meander our way through Spotlight.
I talk to my phone. I type to my laptop.
Cmd-space, type, done.
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 does as long as you've typed something that doesn't match an app. "Safari" and enter will open Safari. "What is safari" and enter will ask Siri the question and show the answer.
A check which, at least on my beloved 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, involves a noticeable delay.
By that you mean that just typing prompt into Spotlight doesn't work reliably? For me after few words "Ask Siri" is first result.
It’s a laggy modal. For the operating system’s native-sometimes-local AI, I’d have expected something snappier.
Clearly, nobody at Apple is thinking globally about this stuff.
If you have kids, "Screen Time" is a reasonable enough name for the place where parental controls live.
If you work under the assumption that AI features are OK in general, but potentially problematic around kids in particular, parental controls are a reasonable enough place to put these AI controls.
If you're not a parent, and have broader concerns about AI, you'd never even think of looking for these options where they are.
As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to configure my iOS/Mac experience to be more intentional/less addictive, I am intimately familiar with Screen Time at this point. And my gut says this isn't an oversight on Apple's part at all.
This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
It's very weird that these aren't in the already existing top level "Siri" or "Privacy & Security" settings tabs. Apple has had a problem for a while now where it seems like they just don't know what they want to do with the settings app, and like you said, doesn't have anyone in charge of the "global" view of the settings. Why are, "Appearance", "Desktop & Dock" and "Wallpaper" all different top level items? Why are "Wi-Fi" and "Network" different top level items? Why is "Battery" top level, but "Time Machine" and "Sharing" and "Date & Time" are all under "General"? Why is "Autofill & Passwords" under general and not "Privacy & Security"?
It's really frustrating that there is no ability to reclaim the drive space in MacOS 27, especially on Macbooks with M1 or M2 chips that can barely use the models. Another great sign of how the OS is deeply on fire IMO.
Especially iPhones.
You can’t determine what is taking up space on your iPhone in the “system data” or “Other” section in iOS. The only way to “reduce” it is to restore and wipe the phone.
That is a scam.
Missing from Apple's list is the feature that suggest filenames.
At first, it was very cool and did a good job with plain text files, and even a PDF. Then it munged the names of several hundred files I was working with that was each named with a street address.
Finder → Settings → Suggest file names
I want the disk space taken from the models back.
I will never touch this garbage and would rather use the disk space I purchased to be used for my purposes, not the industry's pointless fad bubble endeavors.
Same here!
Absolutely 100%. Now I'm very biased against this "AI" stuff in general, but even fans of "AI" can't want this, right? I mean I know some people who are heavy "AI" users and they all either have a setup with Cursor/Codex/Zed/VSCode/whatever or their preferred local model, they'd never ever want to use "whatever Apple happens to ship with the OS". Same with the model Google bundled into their browser, growing Chrome from roughly 200MB to over 4GB. Who's the target audience here?
It's investors isn't it.
You can't imagine a singular person and reason who would want an improved Siri?
On their laptop? No, not really. I guess the selling point is that your computer now suggests file names for you?
The selling point is being able to say things like "remind me about the next early release from school the night before" and it'll dig up the info from your emails and then create the reminder.
And people really trust the bot to do that stuff for them? They risk letting down their kid by not being there to pick them up just to save half a minute of finding the right email? That sounds crazy to me, creating a reminder isn't exactly hard
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).
What does your users want your app to do with a language model?
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 would never have figured out the toggle for writing tools is in `Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Siri -> Writing Assistance`
It's searchable
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?
Searching for "airpod" in settings brings up - Accessibility, "Headphones/AirPods/Beats", Conversation Boost, Noise Cancellation, Press and hold duration, Press speed, Transparency mode
Not sure what went wrong for you, these results seem pretty much on point.
This literally happened yesterday. It tried to bring me to a safari search and I got no other hits. Could've been just a buggy moment with search who knows.
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)
The settings menus in recent iOS & macOS releases have been an absolute mess.
Even worse, once you're there, you toggle _on_ "Content & Privacy", and then what?
What does the toggle on for "Image creation" mean? Is that now restricted? Or is toggle off mean it is restricted?
The Write with Siri button that shows up whenever I select text is so obnoxious that I want to trash this fucking machine after 30+ years on the platform.
Hopefully someone will make a script or small app to disable all of this in one click
Apple, we want one global killswitch and a way to free disk space occupied by unused models.
It's great that you can turn all this off but why is it tucked away in Screen Time of all places?
What's the thinking behind that?
Either dark pattern or incompetence. Sometimes both.