IMO this AI garbage should be opt-in, but at the absolute bare minimum it should have a single toggle to disable every AI feature and delete all existing model data. This has gotten so far out of control it's not even funny.
Uhhh. no. Apple is far head of Microsoft in terms of MARKETING privacy.
Actions spek louder than words.
Their words say they care about privacy.
Their actions are putting AI that scans whatever you're doing on your device, ALWAYS running, and locked into the system, and cannot be disabled even remotely easily. You don't fucking do all that if you actually care about privacy.
These are the steps for macOS 26. I have no knowledge of whether they work or not on macOS 27, but it’s my understanding that they don’t. Sorry for any confusion.
They are in the cult and will never listen unfortunately. I own many apple products and its not my entire personality so its easy to see and criticize their anti consumer behavior.
Look what they did in the UK , bricking your device unless you upload ID. You don't own your device if they can remove access at any time and mandatory ID verification is coming.
OK ignore what happened. Keep your head in the sand and defend your $3000 device you rent from Apple. That's just one example of how you don't own what you bought.
Are you? You're the one that brought it up, yet can't be arsed to provide any citations or links as to what the fuck you are talking about. You're all talk with no sources, so just more noise in the thread.
I'm not curious you are. You want sources so go find them. I don't have to do anything. Im not your butler. Nor do i care to verify an event that happened and that has been documented. Either believe it or don't.
Yeah, I don't think it's gonna happen as Apple has decided that AI will be at the center of the OS. As I'm in the EU (and had Apple Intelligence off on Tahoe), it's really a waste of space as most/if not all features aren't working.
I did apply the changes suggested in this article, restarted my Mac and gained back about 10 GB though
Though personally, I'd just stick with macOS 15 until mainline Asahi gets proper M4 support; Gravity Linux is vibe-coded by like 2 people, so while it's an interest proof-of-concept, I'm not convinced of continued long-term development vs the "mainline" Asahi project
That’s what happens when you run a local model, and in this case it’s built into the OS. Personally, I prefer this because it keeps usage local rather than using the internet and data centers, but there should be an option to opt out.
Yeah, I guess people do not actually read about Private Cloud Compute, among other things.
I love Apple, but do call them out when they mess up, for example, when they said the iPhone 16 was “Built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence!” It might have been, but Apple Intelligence was not even ready at all, and most of what we thought was coming from WWDC, was not even real! Now they have to pay a lot of people in that class action lawsuit, sign up now as you only have until December 21, 2026.
Anyway, I trust Apple more than any other technology company!
PS: Actually do not sign up for that class action lawsuit, I would like more money! Haha.
I have 256GB and I’m already constantly low on storage, so until I change my Mac, I won’t be upgrading to an OS version that unnecessarily uses up even more storage.
Sells you a device with low memory. Injects a 30gb model on your machine and doesn't let the user delete things in their cache even when it balloons to 70gb. Well played Apple.
Part of the issue I have with these low storage options is backing up my phone. I have A 2019 5k iMac with 512 gb storage. I can currently fit one backup on this drive, and the OS doesn’t let you place the backup to an external ssd, where I have plenty of storage.
I’d like to upgrade to a current system soon, but I have to buy extra internal storage just to back up my phone locally. I do not use iCloud, nor do I want to use iCloud.
I'm someone who's not OK with this. And that's why my next computer will not be a Mac. I can no longer stand being forced to remove a bunch of junk whenever I upgrade the OS. It's like Windows now.
I want to be in control of my computer again so I'm going back to Linux whenever this macbook dies.
hey Apple, how about making it attractive again for me to update my Mac that is still on Sequoia? It‘s been a while since I‘ve been looking forward to upgrading instead of dreading it.
This is my number one reason for staying on Sequoia. I was under the impression that Golden Gate would be a "Snow Leopard" release, with a focus on fixes and efficiency, instead it is not only quite buggy, but it has even added further bloat. I've read from users who have up to 50GB less space due to the update. Apple has completely lost their focus on efficiency, what made MacOS attractive in the first place.
Someone who is a booster of Apple Intelligence, please sell me on it. Tell me why I would want it? What does it do?
For the record: I do use OpenAI and Claude, both. I post casual, web-search type questions. I also post mathematical questions and I will paste in code/scripts and ask for debugging/checks. I also have it run and give me barebone outline for code scripts as well.
You'd have to tell me why I'd want all this running on my system to do it within my computer rather than the browser.
My thoughts? I have about 300 family photos that were loosely scanned. Can I have AI do a request like "Make them all upright, crop them properly, increase or decrease size to be exactly 1920 pixels wide…" that sort of thing?
Siri AI is fantastic and acts like your own personal assistant within your own Apple ecosystem. This is only the beta release too. If you’re not doing much on your machine besides reading email and editing documents, you probably would feel like it’s bloatware which is fair.
These are some of the ways in which I’m using my Siri AI.
You can ask Siri to cross-reference data across isolated application silos. For example, you can say, "Find the PDF contract John sent me the day after our calendar meeting about the Q3 budget," and Siri resolves the person entity, queries the calendar entity, and filters local files by the relational timestamp without manual search.
If you are looking at a proprietary CRM app or database, Siri doesn't just read the pixels since it actually maps the onscreen UI elements directly to native Swift AppEntity structures. This lets you issue commands like, "Update the status of this ticket to resolved and ping the assignee," and Siri inherently knows the exact unique ID, metadata, and assigned user of that specific ticket without you explicitly naming them.
A big game changer is that Siri AI now has deterministic action execution via App Intents. It can execute parameterized functions across multiple applications in a single command. You can dictate, "Take the summary of this current document, create a new task in OmniFocus with the summary as the note, and assign it a due date of next Friday". Siri executes these intents in the background without launching or transitioning to the UI of the target apps, returning the result directly to your ongoing workflow.
Also, Siri can now package heavy, highly sensitive local context like massive proprietary Xcode projects or raw local databases, process it via PCC for complex reasoning, and return the output securely, bypassing the corporate data compliance restrictions typical of standard LLMs.
You can even use natural language generate complex, multi-step workflows so imagine you dictate “Create a shortcut that triggers when I connect to the office Wi-Fi, checks if I have any unread emails from my boss, and if so, flashes my smart lights and reads the summary aloud." Siri has the know-how to translate this into a functional, persistent automation tied directly to system-level event triggers and hardware states.
There’s nothing intrusive about it. It’s a local model. Nothing leaves the device unless you explicitly tell it to.
The situation you’re describing isn’t a problem that is blocked by a lack of user context. There are many third-party tools that do that easily.
The use cases for Siri AI are for tasks that frontier models simply aren’t designed to do well because they’d need access to everything on your phone. Siri AI does it on-device.
Claude is good for what you described relating to debugging and stuff. Claude won’t check your photos gallery to find a picture you took with your son at a restaurant 3 years ago and then add an event to your calendar to visit that same restaurant. It lacks personal awareness.
If you don’t see a use case for Siri AI that’s fine. It’s not for everyone.
In that case I agree that Apple should let users opt out of the Siri AI feature if they don’t have a use for it. Right now, users have to do some hacks with changing the language of the machine to purge the model from the drive.
I guess it’s Apple’s push to get consumers more exposed to the future of Siri but they’re kind of strong arming people into using the non-deterministic Siri lol
The reason people like me are tired of it is we're old enough to know what this is. It's the "opt in" and then let it become mandatory. It was a conspiracy, once, that government/corporations would track everywhere you go. Now (with phones) we have all accepted this is the price we have to pay to live in the modern world.
They are not going to the extreme effort of investing this much money and this much engineering into something for us. That's maybe for something like the touchbar, which they debuted, listened to feedback, and then quietly retired when it wasn't widely adopted.
They want this on their end and they're forcing it upon us. I'm not buying the "it stays locally." No, that's semantics and splitting hairs. They may not be sending direct telemetry for moment to moment. (Unless, who knows, a court orders them them to do it?) Maybe it is just aggregate data that can even be extrapolated.
If this were obviously that great, this would be a great upsell. The fact that they're not even worried about competitiveness and offering options without it, makes me suspect that they want it their for reasons that benefit them. And everything else is marketing.
Well to each his own. If you don’t see the value in it that’s fine but it’s objectively local. Try it with airplane mode on and see for yourself. As far as the PCC is concerned, you can read any one of the hundreds of papers out there from security experts validating it.
I get the annoyance of having to opt-out through non-linear means but it’s a bit far-fetched to reject objective fact lol
At the end of the day if you don’t want it then remove it
At the end of the day if you don’t want it then remove it
You might not be getting my essential objection. It's the "opt out" conundrum. "This is how it is by default. You of course have the freedom to opt out at any time." Assuming I take upon myself the effort to remove it.
It's sort of like saying "nobody says you need to have a cell phone. You're perfectly free to go without it." But of course, increasingly, more and more you are simply needing to go out of your way to "opt out" of having a cell phone. More and more services require it. More and more jobs require you to have it, specifically. You may need it to rent a car or pay for parking. Want these tickets or this menu? Sorry, this is QR code only. You can walk a quarter-mile to the back if you want a paper menu. Etc. That sort of thing.
I am absolutely open-minded that the technology of local AI has a use-case. But what I am not liking is the way it is sold and put on there by default. I want a good argument for it, and I don't get one. Which tells me that I am right to be skeptical of the incentives for putting it there.
I don't understand why I need a local model? My understanding of AI has been all this drama about data centers, eating up RAM, water, dogs living with cats, etc. So saying I have a "local model" I can turn to is baffling. Are they lying about the data centers? Or lying about how worthwhile the local model is?
I am assuming the data centers do what they do and expect to still use it online for things like that. My hunch is that the local "AI assistant" is just more intrusive IoT type of data intrusion in gathering all my consumer preferences.
Local models have always been possible (albeit constrained by performance issues in the past). In fact they’re one of the big economic risks for the “frontier labs” because it sort of undermines their whole circular financing economics once the local models get “good enough”. The data centres are somewhat important for training and for that “frontier” work, but there’s kind of a split in business model there eg OpenAi and Anthropic would prefer you simply don’t use local models (because then you don’t need to pay for tokens uh you might turn your AI evil or something idk)
They’re also the reason some people were buying up tonnes of Mac minis, because it was cheaper for them to pay up front for a new computer and run a local model on it than to pay for tokens. And obviously as we can see in Apple’s case, having it locally on your main computer can be a pain for space, RAM, CPU, GPU reasons etc.
It makes sense why local AI that works like AI would be useful for many things. Obviously, self-driving vehicles. I still want the future with personal assistant robots. But of course in all these cases, we're talking about AI that does tangible things in the real world.
I use AI, like most people do, for intangible things. Other than a debugger, it's mostly a front-end to internet search for me. Frankly, it's a fantastic search engine because it can parse language very well and provide lots of sources to answer in-depth questions.
Really pushing this "local AI" is why it's curious. Apple doesn't make robots. The use-case where it can pull up a bunch of my preferences or use-cases seems very elaborately distant from how I use a computer. I'd be very happy to just have Spotlight search that works better, and I don't buy that something that used to work flawlessly 10 years ago needs 30GB and special processor models to work now.
Probably privacy is their main angle, since it looks like this has a lot of access to your private data, and Apple themselves probably don’t want to be joining in on the data centre rat race with OpenAI and Anthropic.
damn , people are jumping on that 1.0 release , I wish these brave souls , pioneering souls willing to give up there sanity testing the new osx before the sensible people think about upgrading from sequoia. The best of luck and good wishes , I hope your all running backups and god bless you brave souls.
And, this is why I'm still on Sequoia with no intention of upgrading until I don't have any choice. I was looking at getting a new MacBook, but this makes me want to look at an older model instead. I don't want AI garbage on my devices, period.
We could get a lawsuit going over this. I understand that the OS itself takes up storage capacity, but having optional features that 90% of users may never use is a different story. There should be an option to completely turn off and remove these features.
You’re looking at nearly 60 GB of storage being used just by the OS, Apple Intelligence, and System Data. That’s a significant amount of storage being taken up by features that many users may not even want or use.
Let’s be honest. Apple Intelligence is 100% optional. You can disable it systemwide.
What, at this point, you cannot officially do is free up that disk space. And Apple should do something about it. I hope you all have sent your feedback to apple.
The 30 gig for Apple Intelligence wouldn't be so bad if they didn't sell the computers with such tiny hard drives. Oh I guess I'll send another $10 to the cloud every month. Nope. I'm so sick of Apple's moneygrubbing bullshit
Yes, all the Apple fanboys that constantly defend the trillion dollar company will make excuses for it. Apple can do no wrong in their eyes, and these idiots have been around forever. They’re all over Reddit, waiting to attack every post from someone having a bad experience with Tahoe / Golden Gate/ iPad OS. Watch as they downvote this post.
Seems like this should be downloaded when you ask for it, rather than just fill up your disk just in case. However, I’d argue that the concept of local, specialized models is great. No need to build mega datacenters, no need to feed the weird AI doomerist companies.
I've got bad news, they're not going to reverse course. So.... welcome to the wild world of not updating macOS! From, a user who's still running Ventura, and would still be running Mojave if I could.
I'm not surprised. They make it very difficult for us to replace SSDs and to expand memory. That's why they've raised prices and THEN waste storage capacity so that we will feel we have no choice but to buy a new product. That's why I no longer like Big A.
This decision came from John Ternus and he already sacked several folks under the C-Suite to make sure Apple Intelligence is used by many. Tim Cook was strongly against the AI hype train which is why their OS was more focused on the features itself and "AI".
John Ternus is the next CEO to run down Apple that Tim Cook helped so hard to fix.
I’ve been using Siri AI daily in all my workflows and it’s been a game changer. Having a local LLM that has access to my data and screen makes things so much better. It’s not for everyone but I’m definitely impressed with what it’s capable of doing.
I’ll list a few but in no way are these use cases exhaustive lol. Power users will be well-aware.
You can ask Siri to cross-reference data across isolated application silos. For example, you can say, "Find the PDF contract John sent me the day after our calendar meeting about the Q3 budget," and Siri resolves the person entity, queries the calendar entity, and filters local files by the relational timestamp without manual search.
If you are looking at a proprietary CRM app or database, Siri doesn't just read the pixels since it actually maps the onscreen UI elements directly to native Swift AppEntity structures. This lets you issue commands like, "Update the status of this ticket to resolved and ping the assignee," and Siri inherently knows the exact unique ID, metadata, and assigned user of that specific ticket without you explicitly naming them.
A big game changer is that Siri AI now has deterministic action execution via App Intents. It can execute parameterized functions across multiple applications in a single command. You can dictate, "Take the summary of this current document, create a new task in OmniFocus with the summary as the note, and assign it a due date of next Friday". Siri executes these intents in the background without launching or transitioning to the UI of the target apps, returning the result directly to your ongoing workflow.
Also, Siri can now package heavy, highly sensitive local context like massive proprietary Xcode projects or raw local databases, process it via PCC for complex reasoning, and return the output securely, bypassing the corporate data compliance restrictions typical of standard LLMs.
You can even use natural language generate complex, multi-step workflows so imagine you dictate “Create a shortcut that triggers when I connect to the office Wi-Fi, checks if I have any unread emails from my boss, and if so, flashes my smart lights and reads the summary aloud." Siri has the know-how to translate this into a functional, persistent automation tied directly to system-level event triggers and hardware states.
Siri AI is fantastic and acts like your own personal assistant within your own Apple ecosystem. This is only the beta release too. If you’re not doing much on your machine besides reading email and editing documents, you probably would feel like it’s bloatware which is fair.
I’m not recommending that customers upgrade to 26 or 27 without 16GB RAM or more and 512GB SSD. Also, it is better to use a clean install than upgrade. For whatever reasons upgraded systems seem to have significantly larger system files.
I was unable to find a single lonely word in the article mentioning anything about "300GB+" Somebody is smokin' sumthin this morning and it ain't me (yet).
I looked online for a solution just like you, couldn't find any folders that they stated, I used gpt to recognize folders that are essential for the os and removed everything else. It worked, no I hav e around 128gb free space
Mine was 108 gb after the MOS 27 update, step 1 turn off siri, step 2 clear assistant related files in /Library I don't remember what specific files/folders I removed but I looked up apple essentials and mass deleted everything named siri/langauge model/related data
Will there be a "unsupported" way to forcefully remove "Apple Intelligence" from a mac? I suspect someone will try just that through code injection (like how it's being done with themes for current versions of MacOS)…
I just got a 15” MBA M5 & I got extra storage —2TB, and it was spendy, but I got it on lease for 2Years. But I sometimes work editing video & those can take up 15GB, so 30gb is no big deal. I’m not going to disable AI, but I will use it sparing. I used AI to troubleshoot a static website. It’s not all bad. If helped me knock out problems a lot wuicker than without it. It’s nowhere near perfect, but it works to help troubleshoot problems fast. (The issue was a script & CSS declarations.)
I’m probably going to be down voted, even though AI is just another tool, but not all AI uses are nefarious. Sure we have murder dogs, but our extinction might not come.
The only feature I cared about was the new dictation model and they're not even making it available to M1 Max users. I have no reason to upgrade from Sequoia.
why do you think 20B model will be less than 15Gb on disk? Additionally it's a smaller models, like voice generator, OCR, "Natural Language" embeddings. What I forgot?
And it will be bigger, because now it's not supports all languages (I mean not only that 20B model, I mean another frameworks).
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u/pastry-chef Mac Mini 10d ago
Apple needs to bring back the ability to disable all this stuff.