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.
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.
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.
Whenever I run a “modern, online application” I feel like I’m part of some vast behavior modification experiment where the app company is watching me to see if I’m doing what they want me to do.
It's like saying that wind blows because trees sway.
There's clearly an agenda to double down on stripping away all remaining privacy. The internet as we knew it and remembered as free is just the medium to make that happen, if not purely a byproduct of this.
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.
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.
It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. I know a few people who are in a sort of "late stage icloud" moment with their iPhone. Their phone started filling up with photos and videos years ago. So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones. Eventually those got full too, so they had to go to icloud and a few have basically maxed out their icloud 2tb plans, because these phones are now producing huge files and recording in 4k I guess even though you are still just looking at it on a 5 inch diagonal screen like in the 5mp phone era. The damn icloud previews can fill up your phones internal storage even with everything technically shoved off to icloud.
Frankly even if you know what you are doing apple doesn't make this easy. Image Capture is afaik the only real way to transfer photos to an external drive on iphone. And that app has not really seen any love since release, its buggy and frequently crashes with large transfers in my experience. It does weird things like if you select 13 photos to delete, it will delete them but not remove selection having the next 13 photo block pre selected for reasons that are unclear (Maybe the devs know how terrible the transfer experience is so they make it easy for you to throttle the job to like 250 photo chunks with this ui quirk). And what is worse, those icloud previews technically don't exist in the eyes of Image Capture, so those won't be transferred over let alone show up in the image previews.
But 50GB is $0.99 and I'm only really paying for it since I have a bunch of their private email addresses in use. iPhone backup with just the essentials I trust them with is less than 2GB.
I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
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.
The way apple talks about SIP its like a miracle we survived at all pre SIP. Pretty sure I've had SIP disabled for years now when I got nagged for something or whatever and had to disable it.
SIP is a good thing and prevents a lot of (usually PEBKAC) problems. It is also the direction where Linux is going (is now? or maybe they gave up? idk, it’s been a while since I heard about immutable distros).
For tech-aware people, it is probably not necessary indeed.
However, given that now “tech-aware” people are running completely random and unvalidated scripts w/o second thoughts (or even first thoughts actually) on their main machine, I’d say the “tech-aware” line is very very high…
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 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.
I don't really care if anything else gets blocked as a side effect, except for Find My. As far as I know, `fmfd` and `findmydeviced` are the binaries responsible for that feature, so if I whitelist those binaries I should be fine.
Through my own usage of Little Snitch, it appears that all the iCloud-related features use individual binaries and that iCloud connections go to specific hosts for specific use cases (e.g. pxxx-contacts.icloud.com, pxxx-quota.icloud.com, pxxx-caldav.icloud.com). I'd assume the AI features are the same - specific hosts and binaries that I can block.
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.
Maybe you could set up an Alfred workflow for that using a special hotkey? And then you could use Karabiner-Elements to invoke that when you double-tap Cmd.
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.
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/
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"?
Sure, that's the obvious first pass snarky answer, but clearly they don't care about having associations between AI functions and privacy because they make those associations in all sorts of places. Go into the Siri controls and you find links like: "Voice input is processed on Mac. About Siri, Dictation & Privacy..." or "About Apple Intelligence & Privacy...". Go into the Privacy settings and that's where you find the "Apple Intelligence Report".
And of course the referenced settings despite being under the Screen Time top level settings are still within a sub-section there called specifically "Content & Privacy". So the quick answer is obviously not the correct answer.
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
It shows where it found the information. In this case, it included a link to a text message from the school which had this info, and quoted it so I could see that it got it right, and it shows the reminder it created so I could see that it's correct. I don't really have to trust it, I can see that it's working.
Maybe you have 5 relevant calendar events but it lists 3 and calls it a day. That is from my experience far bigger type of problem with AI. Hallucination by omission
That's exactly what big tech executives and AI bros don't get: It would be useful to use AI for the grudgy but verifiable sub-steps of such a task, e.g. have it help with the email search, and have it suggest a reminder. Or even better, suggest creating a reminder when receiving/reading the email. But leave the user in control, and provide evidence and transparency. Instead, many companies put their bets on the long-shot, do-it-all assistent AI, but technology is just not there yet, or maybe never will even.
I could definitely imagine using a system where I could type in Spotlight "that message about early release from school", hit enter, and have the e-mail or SMS or Signal message or whatever show up in front of me. Boring, non-sexy "better search" style "AI" which is actually useful but doesn't appeal to investors.
Parents—in many places—already let themselves rely entirely on driving their kids to every activity, which puts them at much higher risk of getting maimed in an accident under a guise of efficiency and spurious claims of other danger imposed by living closer to people and the activities that their kids could get themselves to. Many people are lazy, fearful, and prioritize comfort and control over all else, therefore it doesn't surprise me at all to hear people would opt for the convenience whenever an opportunity strikes.
So, just to make it abundantly clear that this is all a bunch of unfounded generalization: the kid in question takes the bus, can get home and get inside independently, and the reason I'm asking this convenient machine for a reminder is just to avoid being surprised.
Asking my phone for a convenient reminder makes me lazy, fearful, and prioritizing comfort and control over all else. Never change, HN. Actually, you know what? Please change, HN. This shit is tiresome.
This reads like a comment from a non-parent, or a comment from the kind of parent who argues its okay for their kid to spend 16 hours with their eyes glued to a screen because "blippi is educational".
I had better success with earlier versions. For me Siri has regressed so much and had become so unreliable, that having to constantly repeat or rephrase or delete whatever nonsense it was doing was so frustrating, I stopped using it years ago.
Its quite the paradox when Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence so hard, yet their assistant that's been around for 15 years can't do even basic things now.
And this right here is why I think Apple should have renamed the new stuff to something else. Go into Settings/Siri, enable Apple Intelligence (you will probably have to join the waitlist), give it a day or two to re-index and then try.
I think you will be astonished at the difference in behavior. It's night and day.
I remember chatting to some people behind Siri (it was an acquisition), and there was a feeling it was better before Apple nerfed and neglected it. Which is very Apple.
I can imagine lots of things- mainly around making short summaries so the user can choose things more easily, or maybe as a smart autocomplete.
I can imagine a home automation app helping you build a workflow with an LLM. Or an RSS reader giving you a short summary of each article. A health app being able to pull recipes into a standard format. Maybe a fitness app being able to search your workout history if you give it good tools.
Idk I usually use my phone for reading HN on the toilet and listening to podcasts while cleaning, not much else. I don’t know what else people even do with a phone lol. But those are things I’ve done in the past that LLMs could be helpful for!
Is this based on user feedback for your app? Do they want your app to feature home automation or making short summaries? Since you were using your app as an example I mean
Not OP, but in my case they are features we already provide that we can make cheaper (for ourselves) by doing it on the user's device rather than paying OpenAI for it.
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.
Real people don't need that. Siri has offered a modest set of voice-integrated features for over a decade, and made almost zero impact. Same for Google Assistant, which sucked less but was still useless.
The average smartphone owner cannot be trusted to switch away from privacy-degrading technologies even if the alternative is good. Look at Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify; it's a Keynesian beauty contest, and ChatGPT has more mindshare than Siri.
The pitch isn’t that it will replace claude or codex runing 284 agents vibeslopping for me. It’s that Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant.
It has a ways to go on some of the productivity stuff, and third parties have work to do, but that’s fine. They built a better foundation than anyone else has for its purpose.
All I really want out of Siri is something I can give actual natural language instructions to about smart home stuff, calendars, timers, "app stuff", without it actively leaking my info to other companies, and in theory this new Siri should be able to do that.
Kinda slow, though. I'm hoping that's just early scaling problems.
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.
Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right?
Just today: “give me directions to the ferry terminal”. I’m on an island with one terminal, I shouldn’t have to be specific.
“Here’s a list of three ferry terminals that are on different islands, none of which are the island you’re on.”
“Give directions to the Orcas Island ferry terminal.”
“Here’s directions to the Port of Orcas Island, which is on the side of the island opposite the ferry terminal.”
If I weren’t driving a camper van on narrow roads, I would have taken her up on the “other island” option. “How do you propose we get there, Siri? Maybe start by driving to the g-ddamned ferry terminal?!”
I was around in the 90's too, which is why I can confidently say it is that bad. What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then. I'm not talking about the big things. More like the bundled apps where they see someone else getting traction with something and then they go and bundle their own K-Mart version of it that no one asked for.
I personally found WMP great. I never felt any urge to install alternatives (and the few times I did end up using another media player, I always thought it was a worse experience than WMP).
The AI in Siri is actually really good. I can ask it something like "what is Judy's favourite food?" and it will do a full search of the databases of all the default apps and find that info.
As for the other AI features such as autocomplete, memoji, notification summaries... I'm really not a big fan at all.
And poor Judy thought for just a moment that someone actually cared enough about her to remember her favourite food. Sorry Judy, youre just not that important I suppose. :|
I have ADHD and am not going to remember a lot about Judy. But I will write down the things that I know she likes in a note, and I'll occasionally ask Siri to list what Judy likes when I'd like to do something nice to her.
I think you may be misunderstanding what the Apple LLMs or models are used for. It almost certainly isn’t something you used to write code for development. It’s to power all the intelligence features on the phone like whenever you ask Siri a question.
I played around with local image generation models not long ago, and I downloaded them myself along with the rest of the software I needed. Then again, the average Apple user seems to want to put themselves on a leash(noose?) with Apple on the other end.
I would probably called pro AI these days considering how much I've worked on getting the people in my organisation to adapt and learn how to use it, and how much I use it professionally. I've not always been pro AI, I'm sure my previous comments have been quite the rollercoaster over the past year. These days I'm part of a process which will probably replace quite a lot of jobs with AI down the line. The morals of which is a different discussion.
I don't use AI personally though. So when I found out that apple intelligence is currently taking up 10gb on my macbook m1 with the tiniest configuration at the time, that's massive. I've turned everything off and denied it access to training on any sort of apps and it's still using up 10gb of my 128. Meaning that Mac OS now takes up 53.76% of my drive. The AI I don't use being 12.8 of that. If Apple sold devices with large drives as default that might be less of an issue, but they don't. It's a little ironic, but I originally switched from Linux to Apple because I want my technology to work out of the box, but now it looks like I'll soon be going back for that same reason.
I honestly do not understand what the 28GB Tahoe update contained. Like, I cannot imagine what all the code does. It'd take a lifetime to actually go through it all, and yet, here I am just using the same programs I did before it, just with rounder corners and some other pretty things. Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.
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.
The blur effect from liquid glass slightly, but noticeably, lowers the frame rate on iOS 27, as well. By turning on "Reduce Transparency" it became a bit smoother, more like iOS 18 was. God I miss iOS 18.
Many apps in the App Store are now 0.5Gb in size. I got an M5 with 2 Terabytes a couple weeks ago and I was wondering why do I need all this space for. I guess I might end up short on space.
I wanted to like Siri AI, but it does not really do anything that I need at the moment.
I was hoping Siri AI could help more in the GUI automation world, but it seems that is not the case.
For example, I was hoping Siri AI could create a Shortcut that would clear/dismiss all notification banners. Nope, it can’t even access nor see notifications.
I have my own scripts and whatnot to handle these desires, but I am just tired of having to rework a lot of them for each OS release.
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.
I tested it just now. My AirPods are connected to the iPhone, and searching “AirPods” gives me the accessibility settings for them, not the actual AirPods’ settings. I have to open the Settings app and then they’re up there, but it’s ridiculous that they don’t show in the search.
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.
Love or hate Omarchy, it's movements like that which are finally going to convince diehard macos users to consider a more open and controllable OS. Small annoyances can be ignored, but after a while, there is too much noise.
I am sure my Macbook uses a RNG to decide whether or not I can use touch ID to unlock.
Apple's assumption seems to be that the only reason you'd want to turn the LLM features off as a consumer is that you're a parent and you don't want your children interacting with LLMs. So they put it where "parent trying to lock down their child's computer" settings are.
(If you look, most other toggles that appear under "Content & Privacy Restrictions" are for similar things: things Apple provides no more-visible setting to disable; because they think you have "no reason" to turn these features off; because these features are, at least in Apple's opinion, "unobtrusive" [i.e. only really doing something if explicitly activated] and "costless.")
In contrast, I presume the underlying setting identifier, as appears in `defaults` and/or MDM profiles, has a more sensible hierarchical prefix based on what potential risks an organization would see in a roll-out of LLM use.
ETA: yes: the macOS settings domain for "LLM stuff" is `com.apple.applicationaccess`, and the declarative-configuration namespace is `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.settings`. Neither of which has anything to do with parental controls per se (though `com.apple.applicationaccess` is generally where MDM settings related to preventing employees from using "potentially insecure" device capabilities live.)
There's also the declarative-configuration namespace of `com.apple.configuration.external-intelligence.settings` ...which is a bit of a bass-ackwards use of their own declarative configuration model, since if it had been `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.external.settings` instead, then the settings in the enclosing "intelligence" namespace would serve as fallback defaults for the external-intelligence specific settings. Ah well.
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.
I wouldn't underestimate their familiarity with dark patterns, the testimony on how they thwarted third party payments suggests they are well aware of the mechanics.
In one model, for example, Apple worked to determine how the “less seamless experience” of using a non-IAP method would lead customers to abandon their transactions. By modeling where this tipping point was, Apple was able to determine when the links would stop being an advantage to developers, which would push them back to using IAP.
Apple also found that more restrictive rules around the placement and formatting of the links themselves could reduce the number of apps that decided to implement these outside links.
Lawyers suggested Cook himself was involved with how the warning to App Store customers would appear, recommending an update to the text that appears when the external links were clicked. In one version, that link warned customers they were “no longer transacting with Apple.” Later, the link was updated to subtly suggest there could be privacy or security risks with purchases made on the web.
I don't know this for sure, but I would also guess that simply not singing into your iCloud account on the Mac is easier and would work just as well.
(I have a Macbook that I use for various things. Other than lack of access to the Apple Store, I don't feel like I'm missing anything from not having an iCloud account.)
My work Mac is not signed into iCloud and the writing tools popup appeared when selecting text on it after updating to macOS 27. I disabled that in the Screen Time settings.
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater! Apple has some impressive privacy technology for Apple Intelligence - including significant open source disclosure for public verification. If you trash them with the rest of the AI vendors, you deincentivize privacy for Apple and for the rest of them.
They describe it in great technical detail here (Private Cloud Compute (PCC) seems to be the server side of Apple Intelligence):
* Stateless Computation: "Private Cloud Compute must use the personal user data that it receives exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling the user’s request. User data must never be available to anyone other than the user, not even to Apple staff, not even during active processing. And user data must not be retained, including via logging or for debugging, after the response is returned to the user."
* Enforceable Gaurantees: "Security and privacy guarantees are strongest when they are entirely technically enforceable, which means it must be possible to constrain and analyze all the components that critically contribute to the guarantees of the overall Private Cloud Compute system. For example, it’s very difficult to reason about what a TLS-terminating load balancer might do with user data during a debugging session, so PCC must not depend on such external components for its core security and privacy guarantees. ..."
* No Privileged Runtime Access: PCC is designed without privileged interfaces that might expose user data.
* Non-Targetability: PCC is designed to ensure that an attacker cannot target specific PCC users.
* Verifiable Transparency: "security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees."
The Log4J vulnerability stressed the importance of avoiding logging passwords and keys. I think the newest Log4J will be about privacy, where PII is regularly exposed and instantly searchable by anyone who wants to know. I actively disable Apple Intelligence because they share my data with numerous 3rd parties with self-certified privacy agreements every time I press a key on the keyboard.
Apple Intelligence because they share my data with numerous 3rd parties with self-certified privacy agreements every time I press a key on the keyboard.
Apple's reputation of being highly secure was shattered by Operation Triangulation. This complex back door allowed the hacker the ability to utilize the on-device AI to sift through data.
The first jailbreak for iOS was available within six months of the original iPhone release, I'm not sure why you think this particular exploit "shattered" a reputation that hadn't existed for 15+ years.
MacOS GG didn't fit on my 16gb USB drives for a clean reinstall so I decided to upgrade from Tahoe and do a clean wipe afterwards, expecting that this leaves me with a clean GG install. But guess what, after wiping I was back on Tahoe after spending hours updating..
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.
I only saw 26 and 15 in the pulldown. Might be due to my {REDACTED} version of macOS.
This comment is exactly what "helpful" solutions in apple discussions are like.
There isn't iOS in the menu at all but it'll say confidently like it is and you'll be triple checking yourself for 5 min like a complete idiot
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.
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...
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.
Presumably it's the LLM integrations into apps people want, not an anthropomorphized assistant
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.
Whenever I run a “modern, online application” I feel like I’m part of some vast behavior modification experiment where the app company is watching me to see if I’m doing what they want me to do.
It's like saying that wind blows because trees sway.
There's clearly an agenda to double down on stripping away all remaining privacy. The internet as we knew it and remembered as free is just the medium to make that happen, if not purely a byproduct of this.
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.
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
What's your point? icloud is hardly necessary for anything.
It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. I know a few people who are in a sort of "late stage icloud" moment with their iPhone. Their phone started filling up with photos and videos years ago. So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones. Eventually those got full too, so they had to go to icloud and a few have basically maxed out their icloud 2tb plans, because these phones are now producing huge files and recording in 4k I guess even though you are still just looking at it on a 5 inch diagonal screen like in the 5mp phone era. The damn icloud previews can fill up your phones internal storage even with everything technically shoved off to icloud.
Frankly even if you know what you are doing apple doesn't make this easy. Image Capture is afaik the only real way to transfer photos to an external drive on iphone. And that app has not really seen any love since release, its buggy and frequently crashes with large transfers in my experience. It does weird things like if you select 13 photos to delete, it will delete them but not remove selection having the next 13 photo block pre selected for reasons that are unclear (Maybe the devs know how terrible the transfer experience is so they make it easy for you to throttle the job to like 250 photo chunks with this ui quirk). And what is worse, those icloud previews technically don't exist in the eyes of Image Capture, so those won't be transferred over let alone show up in the image previews.
But 50GB is $0.99 and I'm only really paying for it since I have a bunch of their private email addresses in use. iPhone backup with just the essentials I trust them with is less than 2GB.
I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
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.
You don't use Outlook I take it.
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.
The way apple talks about SIP its like a miracle we survived at all pre SIP. Pretty sure I've had SIP disabled for years now when I got nagged for something or whatever and had to disable it.
SIP is a good thing and prevents a lot of (usually PEBKAC) problems. It is also the direction where Linux is going (is now? or maybe they gave up? idk, it’s been a while since I heard about immutable distros).
For tech-aware people, it is probably not necessary indeed. However, given that now “tech-aware” people are running completely random and unvalidated scripts w/o second thoughts (or even first thoughts actually) on their main machine, I’d say the “tech-aware” line is very very high…
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.
Ah. That seems far less concerning than the general case.
.... I literally gave you a way to check this yourself. Not sure why you would need a 3d party source to find something you can discover yourself.
Also keep in mind that https://www.obdev.at/blog/a-hole-in-the-wall/ and its subsequent patch https://support.apple.com/en-us/102445 refers to things that bypass the firewall. There are things on your Mac that simply won't function if you block them from phoning home, making your OS an unusable mess.
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.
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.
I don't really care if anything else gets blocked as a side effect, except for Find My. As far as I know, `fmfd` and `findmydeviced` are the binaries responsible for that feature, so if I whitelist those binaries I should be fine.
Through my own usage of Little Snitch, it appears that all the iCloud-related features use individual binaries and that iCloud connections go to specific hosts for specific use cases (e.g. pxxx-contacts.icloud.com, pxxx-quota.icloud.com, pxxx-caldav.icloud.com). I'd assume the AI features are the same - specific hosts and binaries that I can block.
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.
Maybe you could set up an Alfred workflow for that using a special hotkey? And then you could use Karabiner-Elements to invoke that when you double-tap Cmd.
Not ideal, I know, but at least something.
I’m building a local thing with Letta. Going to bind it to that.
No, this is not true for me.
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.
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/
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"?
If AI/LLMs are so great, why isn't Apple using them to better organize all these settings?
Given how bad vibecoded apps are, I would say they do. It is just doing a shitty job.
They don't want you to associate it with it being a privacy and security shortcoming.
Sure, that's the obvious first pass snarky answer, but clearly they don't care about having associations between AI functions and privacy because they make those associations in all sorts of places. Go into the Siri controls and you find links like: "Voice input is processed on Mac. About Siri, Dictation & Privacy..." or "About Apple Intelligence & Privacy...". Go into the Privacy settings and that's where you find the "Apple Intelligence Report".
And of course the referenced settings despite being under the Screen Time top level settings are still within a sub-section there called specifically "Content & Privacy". So the quick answer is obviously not the correct answer.
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.
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
It's likely things like volume snapshots, indexes, application caches etc
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250010335
How can you say it's your computer if you can't just delete the files yourself? Is it really your SSD?
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 shows where it found the information. In this case, it included a link to a text message from the school which had this info, and quoted it so I could see that it got it right, and it shows the reminder it created so I could see that it's correct. I don't really have to trust it, I can see that it's working.
Maybe you have 5 relevant calendar events but it lists 3 and calls it a day. That is from my experience far bigger type of problem with AI. Hallucination by omission
That's exactly what big tech executives and AI bros don't get: It would be useful to use AI for the grudgy but verifiable sub-steps of such a task, e.g. have it help with the email search, and have it suggest a reminder. Or even better, suggest creating a reminder when receiving/reading the email. But leave the user in control, and provide evidence and transparency. Instead, many companies put their bets on the long-shot, do-it-all assistent AI, but technology is just not there yet, or maybe never will even.
I could definitely imagine using a system where I could type in Spotlight "that message about early release from school", hit enter, and have the e-mail or SMS or Signal message or whatever show up in front of me. Boring, non-sexy "better search" style "AI" which is actually useful but doesn't appeal to investors.
Parents—in many places—already let themselves rely entirely on driving their kids to every activity, which puts them at much higher risk of getting maimed in an accident under a guise of efficiency and spurious claims of other danger imposed by living closer to people and the activities that their kids could get themselves to. Many people are lazy, fearful, and prioritize comfort and control over all else, therefore it doesn't surprise me at all to hear people would opt for the convenience whenever an opportunity strikes.
So, just to make it abundantly clear that this is all a bunch of unfounded generalization: the kid in question takes the bus, can get home and get inside independently, and the reason I'm asking this convenient machine for a reminder is just to avoid being surprised.
Asking my phone for a convenient reminder makes me lazy, fearful, and prioritizing comfort and control over all else. Never change, HN. Actually, you know what? Please change, HN. This shit is tiresome.
This reads like a comment from a non-parent, or a comment from the kind of parent who argues its okay for their kid to spend 16 hours with their eyes glued to a screen because "blippi is educational".
I had better success with earlier versions. For me Siri has regressed so much and had become so unreliable, that having to constantly repeat or rephrase or delete whatever nonsense it was doing was so frustrating, I stopped using it years ago.
Its quite the paradox when Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence so hard, yet their assistant that's been around for 15 years can't do even basic things now.
And this right here is why I think Apple should have renamed the new stuff to something else. Go into Settings/Siri, enable Apple Intelligence (you will probably have to join the waitlist), give it a day or two to re-index and then try.
I think you will be astonished at the difference in behavior. It's night and day.
I remember chatting to some people behind Siri (it was an acquisition), and there was a feeling it was better before Apple nerfed and neglected it. Which is very Apple.
Don't most people do that on their phone, maybe because they don't work on a Mac all day long? Anyway, being able to do it also on the computer is OK.
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?
I can imagine lots of things- mainly around making short summaries so the user can choose things more easily, or maybe as a smart autocomplete.
I can imagine a home automation app helping you build a workflow with an LLM. Or an RSS reader giving you a short summary of each article. A health app being able to pull recipes into a standard format. Maybe a fitness app being able to search your workout history if you give it good tools.
Idk I usually use my phone for reading HN on the toilet and listening to podcasts while cleaning, not much else. I don’t know what else people even do with a phone lol. But those are things I’ve done in the past that LLMs could be helpful for!
Is this based on user feedback for your app? Do they want your app to feature home automation or making short summaries? Since you were using your app as an example I mean
Not OP, but in my case they are features we already provide that we can make cheaper (for ourselves) by doing it on the user's device rather than paying OpenAI for it.
Lots of use cases. Image understanding / labeling is what I had in mind.
But also voice-to-text, (certain kinds of) search, document summarization, are common things that I could see many apps using Apple Intelligence for.
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.
Is Apple Intelligence's local models better than free ChatGPT?
Wrong question, even though Siri AI has a plugin for ChatGPT you don’t need an account for, even if you have one.
At the same time, ask stock ChatGPT when your next dentist appointment is. It can’t but Siri AI can.
Real people don't need that. Siri has offered a modest set of voice-integrated features for over a decade, and made almost zero impact. Same for Google Assistant, which sucked less but was still useless.
The average smartphone owner cannot be trusted to switch away from privacy-degrading technologies even if the alternative is good. Look at Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify; it's a Keynesian beauty contest, and ChatGPT has more mindshare than Siri.
I’m a developer.
The pitch isn’t that it will replace claude or codex runing 284 agents vibeslopping for me. It’s that Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant.
It has a ways to go on some of the productivity stuff, and third parties have work to do, but that’s fine. They built a better foundation than anyone else has for its purpose.
All I really want out of Siri is something I can give actual natural language instructions to about smart home stuff, calendars, timers, "app stuff", without it actively leaking my info to other companies, and in theory this new Siri should be able to do that.
Kinda slow, though. I'm hoping that's just early scaling problems.
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.
time-travelling KGB operatives from 1991.
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.
1. I was around in the 90’s; nothing today is that bad.
2. Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. You don’t realize how useful personal context is until you have it.
Something like “When was the last time I went to that pizza place downtown?”—it just works.
When you call the airline about your flight, your flight info automatically shows up.
Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right?
Siri is completely useless.
Hah. Reminds me of carplay: "text (name)" "what would you like to know about (name)?" "f****** text them" dance daily while driving.
Just today: “give me directions to the ferry terminal”. I’m on an island with one terminal, I shouldn’t have to be specific.
“Here’s a list of three ferry terminals that are on different islands, none of which are the island you’re on.”
“Give directions to the Orcas Island ferry terminal.”
“Here’s directions to the Port of Orcas Island, which is on the side of the island opposite the ferry terminal.”
If I weren’t driving a camper van on narrow roads, I would have taken her up on the “other island” option. “How do you propose we get there, Siri? Maybe start by driving to the g-ddamned ferry terminal?!”
I was around in the 90's too, which is why I can confidently say it is that bad. What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then. I'm not talking about the big things. More like the bundled apps where they see someone else getting traction with something and then they go and bundle their own K-Mart version of it that no one asked for.
An absolute must have feature!
Just kidding. Couldn’t give a fuck about that.
I personally found WMP great. I never felt any urge to install alternatives (and the few times I did end up using another media player, I always thought it was a worse experience than WMP).
The AI in Siri is actually really good. I can ask it something like "what is Judy's favourite food?" and it will do a full search of the databases of all the default apps and find that info.
As for the other AI features such as autocomplete, memoji, notification summaries... I'm really not a big fan at all.
And poor Judy thought for just a moment that someone actually cared enough about her to remember her favourite food. Sorry Judy, youre just not that important I suppose. :|
I have ADHD and am not going to remember a lot about Judy. But I will write down the things that I know she likes in a note, and I'll occasionally ask Siri to list what Judy likes when I'd like to do something nice to her.
ADHD and memory problems suck :(
I think you may be misunderstanding what the Apple LLMs or models are used for. It almost certainly isn’t something you used to write code for development. It’s to power all the intelligence features on the phone like whenever you ask Siri a question.
I played around with local image generation models not long ago, and I downloaded them myself along with the rest of the software I needed. Then again, the average Apple user seems to want to put themselves on a leash(noose?) with Apple on the other end.
I would probably called pro AI these days considering how much I've worked on getting the people in my organisation to adapt and learn how to use it, and how much I use it professionally. I've not always been pro AI, I'm sure my previous comments have been quite the rollercoaster over the past year. These days I'm part of a process which will probably replace quite a lot of jobs with AI down the line. The morals of which is a different discussion.
I don't use AI personally though. So when I found out that apple intelligence is currently taking up 10gb on my macbook m1 with the tiniest configuration at the time, that's massive. I've turned everything off and denied it access to training on any sort of apps and it's still using up 10gb of my 128. Meaning that Mac OS now takes up 53.76% of my drive. The AI I don't use being 12.8 of that. If Apple sold devices with large drives as default that might be less of an issue, but they don't. It's a little ironic, but I originally switched from Linux to Apple because I want my technology to work out of the box, but now it looks like I'll soon be going back for that same reason.
I honestly do not understand what the 28GB Tahoe update contained. Like, I cannot imagine what all the code does. It'd take a lifetime to actually go through it all, and yet, here I am just using the same programs I did before it, just with rounder corners and some other pretty things. Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.
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.
Yeah I'm running macOS 15 until it becomes unsupported, then I'm going to try Debian or Fedora.
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.
The blur effect from liquid glass slightly, but noticeably, lowers the frame rate on iOS 27, as well. By turning on "Reduce Transparency" it became a bit smoother, more like iOS 18 was. God I miss iOS 18.
Nice find. Is there also somewhere online a test done with this (I believe you but am just curious to see how much)?
That's a good point. It was just observation, but it would be nice see a visual test.
A good chunk of this (20GB) is AI models, particularly Apple's local LLM (used to power parts of Siri and a couple other things)
It's not really "code" in the traditional sense
Many apps in the App Store are now 0.5Gb in size. I got an M5 with 2 Terabytes a couple weeks ago and I was wondering why do I need all this space for. I guess I might end up short on space.
I wanted to like Siri AI, but it does not really do anything that I need at the moment.
I was hoping Siri AI could help more in the GUI automation world, but it seems that is not the case.
For example, I was hoping Siri AI could create a Shortcut that would clear/dismiss all notification banners. Nope, it can’t even access nor see notifications.
I have my own scripts and whatnot to handle these desires, but I am just tired of having to rework a lot of them for each OS release.
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.
I tested it just now. My AirPods are connected to the iPhone, and searching “AirPods” gives me the accessibility settings for them, not the actual AirPods’ settings. I have to open the Settings app and then they’re up there, but it’s ridiculous that they don’t show in the search.
Great, Apple hired the team from Microsoft search too.
That doesn’t surprise me. Search in Settings is sketchy.
The other day “login” didn’t produce Login Items. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you tried it right now and it worked fine.
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.
If I want Siri to talk faster do I go to:
- Accessibility > Siri > Siri Speaking Rate
or
- Siri > Voice
Because in iOS 27 these two are absolutely not the same thing, and the one you probably want is the latter.
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?
And people complained about Symbian menus...
Wow insane.
Ah yes, bad design, something Apple is famous for.
This is obviously intentional.
It's a common pattern in Apple products. They make it hard to turn off settings they really don't want you to turn off.
Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.
Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.
Is it not Privacy & Security -> Apple Advertising -> Personalized Ads?
Love or hate Omarchy, it's movements like that which are finally going to convince diehard macos users to consider a more open and controllable OS. Small annoyances can be ignored, but after a while, there is too much noise.
I am sure my Macbook uses a RNG to decide whether or not I can use touch ID to unlock.
Instead of funding a skin UI for Linux, that money could have been used better to fund Asahi Linux.
How is this remotely related to omarchy? Nobody cares about your dotfile collection run by a racist and his racist friends.
Apple's assumption seems to be that the only reason you'd want to turn the LLM features off as a consumer is that you're a parent and you don't want your children interacting with LLMs. So they put it where "parent trying to lock down their child's computer" settings are.
(If you look, most other toggles that appear under "Content & Privacy Restrictions" are for similar things: things Apple provides no more-visible setting to disable; because they think you have "no reason" to turn these features off; because these features are, at least in Apple's opinion, "unobtrusive" [i.e. only really doing something if explicitly activated] and "costless.")
In contrast, I presume the underlying setting identifier, as appears in `defaults` and/or MDM profiles, has a more sensible hierarchical prefix based on what potential risks an organization would see in a roll-out of LLM use.
ETA: yes: the macOS settings domain for "LLM stuff" is `com.apple.applicationaccess`, and the declarative-configuration namespace is `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.settings`. Neither of which has anything to do with parental controls per se (though `com.apple.applicationaccess` is generally where MDM settings related to preventing employees from using "potentially insecure" device capabilities live.)
There's also the declarative-configuration namespace of `com.apple.configuration.external-intelligence.settings` ...which is a bit of a bass-ackwards use of their own declarative configuration model, since if it had been `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.external.settings` instead, then the settings in the enclosing "intelligence" namespace would serve as fallback defaults for the external-intelligence specific settings. Ah well.
Probably it is under Privacy because one day it will be transcribing everything you say and sending to government.
They already gave idea with client side scanning and now UK government will mandate that.
The next step is conversations.
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.
yes, please, and also via cli so we can automate it.
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.
I wouldn't underestimate their familiarity with dark patterns, the testimony on how they thwarted third party payments suggests they are well aware of the mechanics.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...
Seems like they think turning it off is only for kids’ devices. Perhaps they are missing the fact that many adults don’t want it either.
I’m curious what “many” means across billions of people.
Because I’d guess nearly everyone wants the new Siri to just be there and working.
Every time I turn on my M5 I have to manually turn apple intelligence off.
Clearly a poor buy on my part
How about removing the Siri button from the menu bar? This doesn’t seem possible anymore (it reappears some time after dragging it out)
Settings > Menu bar
Uncheck Siri
Oh wow, I need to customize every app to disable learning from that app?
Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.
I don't know this for sure, but I would also guess that simply not singing into your iCloud account on the Mac is easier and would work just as well.
(I have a Macbook that I use for various things. Other than lack of access to the Apple Store, I don't feel like I'm missing anything from not having an iCloud account.)
I also avoid signing in to iCloud to prevent Apple from scanning my files and photos.
I think the App Store sign in is separate from iCloud btw.
You can just turn on E2E encryption for iCloud Photos
My work Mac is not signed into iCloud and the writing tools popup appeared when selecting text on it after updating to macOS 27. I disabled that in the Screen Time settings.
I know macOS is a private OS, but what is inside the binary blob? Why my mail client think some emails are important but not are.
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater! Apple has some impressive privacy technology for Apple Intelligence - including significant open source disclosure for public verification. If you trash them with the rest of the AI vendors, you deincentivize privacy for Apple and for the rest of them.
They describe it in great technical detail here (Private Cloud Compute (PCC) seems to be the server side of Apple Intelligence):
https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
.
At the heart of it, they provide these guarantees:
https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
* Stateless Computation: "Private Cloud Compute must use the personal user data that it receives exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling the user’s request. User data must never be available to anyone other than the user, not even to Apple staff, not even during active processing. And user data must not be retained, including via logging or for debugging, after the response is returned to the user."
* Enforceable Gaurantees: "Security and privacy guarantees are strongest when they are entirely technically enforceable, which means it must be possible to constrain and analyze all the components that critically contribute to the guarantees of the overall Private Cloud Compute system. For example, it’s very difficult to reason about what a TLS-terminating load balancer might do with user data during a debugging session, so PCC must not depend on such external components for its core security and privacy guarantees. ..."
* No Privileged Runtime Access: PCC is designed without privileged interfaces that might expose user data.
* Non-Targetability: PCC is designed to ensure that an attacker cannot target specific PCC users.
* Verifiable Transparency: "security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees."
The Log4J vulnerability stressed the importance of avoiding logging passwords and keys. I think the newest Log4J will be about privacy, where PII is regularly exposed and instantly searchable by anyone who wants to know. I actively disable Apple Intelligence because they share my data with numerous 3rd parties with self-certified privacy agreements every time I press a key on the keyboard.
Who does Apple share your data with?
When I hear a discussion among peers about Apple AI and security I remind them of this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112
Apple's reputation of being highly secure was shattered by Operation Triangulation. This complex back door allowed the hacker the ability to utilize the on-device AI to sift through data.
The first jailbreak for iOS was available within six months of the original iPhone release, I'm not sure why you think this particular exploit "shattered" a reputation that hadn't existed for 15+ years.
MacOS GG didn't fit on my 16gb USB drives for a clean reinstall so I decided to upgrade from Tahoe and do a clean wipe afterwards, expecting that this leaves me with a clean GG install. But guess what, after wiping I was back on Tahoe after spending hours updating..
Mmg
"Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac"
That title in itself is a good indicator of how they think of consent. If instead it was:
"Turn on and enable access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac"
I suspect there would be far less anger from the users.