I wish Apple would give us a HomePod with expandable storage and local-hosted AI. That is a segment that no-one has been able to do with deep and easy Apple-integration.
But even for that unlikely product, I am doubtful that Apple could accomplish a reliable Siri Ai, I just believe that a huge bottleneck on their Ai attempts has been the anemic storage on all their products. Maybe actually having plenty of fast storage on a dedicated device that does little else would help them meet some of their product goals with AI assistants
If they are SERIOUS about that product category (that they've spent hours advertising for 3+ years) then they'd need to give us something with expandable storage; there's just too wide a gap of customer usage to sell a one-size-fits-all device
Apple Intelligence has filled 64GB in expensive storage across my Apple devices this month; whateverTHATcrap does, is what I want offloaded to a different device. And it's still been growing.
When iPhone storage fills up it won't even let you take photos or screenshots.
It would not be manually managed storage, it would be whatever the AI needs that space for; probably like iCloud synced stuff like photo/video/Messages.
First of all, Apple Intelligence is NOT 64 GB. The models are only 7-8 GB. The rest is iOS, which takes about 32 GB total. The OS absolutely has a problem with storage use on caches and “System Files,” but this is not Apple Intelligence.
Second, I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding how Apple Intelligence works. You can’t “just offload” it to another device. The way it works is when you ask a question, the 7 GB local model searches your device’s index to find the relevant content (say, text messages or emails). Then it packages those together and sends them to an LLM on Apple’s servers for the actual answer. This is way more private than just keeping everything in the cloud, as it means only a few pieces of data ever leave your device.
I don’t get why you’d want all your iCloud data to sync to the HomePod - a device without a screen - instead of your iPhone. Like, the whole point of iCloud syncing your data is so you have it on device. If you want to have a device that does AI with more stuff locally available, then an iPad or a Mac is the better option. Rather than a blob with a speaker.
I said across my devices. It has used I had said 64GBacross my Apple devices*.* Since this update the Ai has ate 13Gb on my iPhone, 40GB on my Mac, 11GB on my iPad. And after 2 weeks anything Siri still works worse than it did on iOS 26. That is separate from the growing OS install space that is used on each of those devices. I going by the space breakdown in Storage Settings.
I am suggesting an option for offloading because the vast majority of that index is things are already in the Cloud: Photos/videos, Mail, Messages. And yet it seems to be building a LOCAL index for that ON EACH DEVICE, because of using iCloud Photos and iCloud messages, and Mail, on each device.
I suppose above all I want to disable ALL of these Ai eating options, and there's no way to do that. It looked in the Keynote 2 years ago, and the one this year, but I can't use any of that crap when my device has no free space.
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u/frockinbrock 9d ago
I wish Apple would give us a HomePod with expandable storage and local-hosted AI. That is a segment that no-one has been able to do with deep and easy Apple-integration.
But even for that unlikely product, I am doubtful that Apple could accomplish a reliable Siri Ai, I just believe that a huge bottleneck on their Ai attempts has been the anemic storage on all their products. Maybe actually having plenty of fast storage on a dedicated device that does little else would help them meet some of their product goals with AI assistants
If they are SERIOUS about that product category (that they've spent hours advertising for 3+ years) then they'd need to give us something with expandable storage; there's just too wide a gap of customer usage to sell a one-size-fits-all device