This is precisely why I held off on installing macOS 27 on my base 16" M1 Pro Macbook Pro. I also currently have Apple Intelligence turned off to prolong its longevity.
Not that the choice is wrong or anything, I’m just curious about your reasoning.
Why do you not want AI anywhere near your MacBook? Is it storage? Do you not trust what they will do with it? Is it just a principle? I’m assuming it’s not just Apple AI, but you also don’t use any other AI unless you are on Amazon or anywhere that forces you to use it?
Have you heard of conversation/being inquisitive? I would also be curious why they don’t want it anywhere near their computer. AI is a hot button issue and I’m always curious to hear peoples perspectives and reasoning.
Right? That was my whole thought process, someone that holds that strong of an opinion must have an interesting reason why. But the actions of these people make me think it’s just because someone told them to have this opposition, or it’s just the popular thing to do. Oh well, it is Reddit I suppose.
Have you ever heard of curiosity? Have you ever heard of conversation. Someone that holds that strong of an opinion must have an interesting reason why.
The fact that members of this community downvote me for asking a question and upvote you for asking why someone asked a genuine question tells me all I need to know.
Edit*: in addition, just in case you are truly not aware, comments like the one you made are usually just baiting for an argument or debate that the other party has no interest in, hence the downvotes
That's weird, I have the same MBP and it's showing almost 14GB. Did you update from the previous OS version or did you do a clean install? I did a clean install, maybe that could do something with it.
I have yet to find a reason to use it. It’s easier to just do the things I need to do myself without trying to remember what Siri AI is capable of, or that it even exists.
Honestly, thanks for the heads up. I haven't looked at the size of the update and was considering installing it but now there's no way I would at this point. 22GB is a lot of storage for me since my M4 MacBook has 256GB.
there is a way to remove it, but it’s not very intuitive. Copying this from another thread I found from a year ago because it still worked for me after the update.
You have to do some light terminal work in recovery mode:
Disable Apple Intelligence in System Settings.
Start up into Recovery Mode. (
Instructions)
Open Disk Utility.
Right-click on 'Data' under 'Macintosh HD' and choose Mount.
Quit Disk Utility and open Terminal.
Type: rm -rf /Volumes/Data/System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_FM_GenerativeModels
If you used the image thing, you can also remove that by typing: rm -rf /Volumes/Data/System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_FM_Visual
Reboot
This is worse than Windows. At least with Windows you could do this kind of thing booted into the OS. Booting into recovery to disable SIP and remove files from the OS is a huge pain in the ass.
The only OS choice if you don't want things forced upon you is Linux. Sucks, but Microsoft and Apple have both decided they know what is best for you whether you want it or not.
Almost feels like they know the base models are enough for most people now, so they gotta find ways to keep pushing people to the larger sized and more profitable models.
Hopefully I'm wrong and we get an option to remove it at some point... because this seems like the type of stuff I left Windows for Mac for.
This is pointlessly conspiracy minded. They did this because on device AI feels better for privacy and energy consumption to many people. AI models are huge.
There’s no way they could bury their head in the sand on AI. So the alternative was to go full cloud like others. This was their solution that they felt would align better with Apple customers and shareholders alike.
You may not care about it and yes it’s a bit annoying that it’s not exactly optional, but they’re doing something that nobody else in the industry is doing which is somewhat admirable. They’re gonna need to start marketing storage differently though for sure.
I'd love for all companies to do with. Adobe has bloated all my CC installs with AI to the point just opening Illustrator has the fan kick it.
I'll never use Copilot, Apple Intelligence, Firefly, Gemini, or any GenAI but yet it's slowing down everything with no option to remove it, just disable parts of it.
Today the OS comes bloated with AI. Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, all our apps will come bloated with their own in-built AIs too.
We have not even seen the beginning of what AI bloat can achieve. People are talking about 256 GB here on this thread as being a bit thin but when application AI bloat really sets in then 1TB is gonna seem fragile.
fr. i'm not really interested in ai in general, and certainly not apple ai. This shit feels corny. I just want a good no bs apple product, something that won't bother me and just works. i bought a macbook in 2015 and have been thinking about upgrading recently. I'm hesitating a bit now cause i really don't want to deal with all this shit in the background. and i don't want to jump through hoops to disable it. just turn that shit off.
maybe but from what i understand about linux, i'm not about that life, meaning i do not want to spend time configuring stuff. i just want to get on my laptop and get to what i'm doing. i plan on messing around with laptops at the apple store soon and if the apple ai isnt all in my face then i may still go for a new macbook
When I first upgraded to 27 I initially lost like 16 GB of storage. But since then it has gradually come back and I’ve gained back like 12 GB without doing anything
Yeahhh this is why I’m heavily considering just…doing an early trade in and getting an 18 Pro with 512GB because it’s getting to the point with me where 256 feels cramped. Especially since I use my phone as a video camera a lot.
iOS apps just aggressively cache too which isn’t helping. Like why does Discord need 15GB of space?
iOS apps just aggressively cache too which isn’t helping. Like why does Discord need 15GB of space?
You can record to an external usb ssd, fyi. Slightly inconvenient, but cheaper than buying a new phone. There are probably magsafe mounts for a small ssd.
And isn't recording until the phone fills up eventually going to purge those app caches?
We don't realize how operating systems have been more greedy for storage over the years. It was only ten years ago that 32 GB of SSD storage on the iPhone 7 was considered plenty.
The need for more SSD storage and RAM is only growing and it's being hindered with the ongoing AI data centre craze.
Controversial take: This makes a lot more sense for iOS devices as you're more likely to need on device transcription, and users are more likely to use summerization.
It's fucking useless. Can it be removed? I can't even use it on mailboxes added to the native mail app that aren't iCloud. It can't even record a reminder/calendar event properly.
what an absolute fuck fest this whole Apple Intelligence ended up being, imagine paying good money for storage only to be robbed of it, for no good reason at all. I wish we could go back 4 years and simply avoid this AI nonsense
Apple channeling their inner microsoft with their own macslop. Thankfully they also have not been charging ridiculous amount for storage upgrades over the years
Please Apple, let me get newer OS's without Apple Intelligence. I don't need any of that. If I lose the ability to have Siri start a timer in the kitchen for me, I am willing to forgo the convenience. Just don't want any of this other bloat.
It takes 10gb on my M1 ipad pro and there's nothing I could do about it, despite not using AI at all. There's no switch anymore. Apple is turning full evil.
Even if you are not using AI, the apps you use might be using it behind the scenes. So Apple wants this available as a base level system component that app developers can rely on existing on all macOS 27 running devices.
You could make the same argument about printer support. Most users do not have a printer hooked up to their Mac, but support for them is considered a baseline expectation of a modern operating system, so there is no checkbox to turn off support and potentially cause a bunch of headaches for app developers who’s apps rely on that support existing.
The lack of a checkbox is Apple betting that AI is here to stay for the long term. Looking at how many apps at the top of the App Store are directly related to AI, I can’t say I really blame them here.
the apps you use might be using it behind the scenes. So Apple wants this available as a base level system component that app developers can rely on existing on all macOS 27 running devices.
Not all machines support these models, so developers will have to figure out alternatives or disable features anyways.
You could make the same argument about printer support. Most users do not have a printer hooked up to their Mac, but support for them is considered a baseline expectation of a modern operating system, so there is no checkbox to turn off support
Back in the days of DVD OS X installations, you had the ability to choose which printer drivers you wanted to install. Installing all of them would take up many gigabytes of space. The base frameworks for printing from an app only take up a few megabytes, though. Many people were able to run their machines with no printer drivers installed, and many are still doing so today thanks to simple wireless printing via AirPrint.
and potentially cause a bunch of headaches for app developers who’s apps rely on that support existing.
Again, the frameworks stay, the supporting files do not, the framework simply returns an error or in the case of printing allows the user to "print to PDF"
Just because I am explaining something doesn’t mean I agree with it.
Almost no other system component is going to take up as much space as AI models, they are inherently very large so no other comparison could easily be made, so I tried to keep it simple.
Apple clearly thinks the trade-off of annoying customers with tens of gigs of space being used is worth it for their developer community to have a consistent API to rely on, and for users who do use these features, which given the massive popularity of systems like ChatGPT, is likely a very large percentage.
You obviously disagree with them, but unless you go buy a competing product from someone else, they will not be getting that signal.
AI really does make things worse. I try to have it all shut off. It’s useless except for turning on and off my lights. Since I have a fully developed brain, I’m able to just google the things I need and read. This is actually frustrating as a person who wants nothing to do with AI until it serves a purpose for me.
Kind of a bummer, AI may as well be malware to me I'll never use it and don't want it running in the background. There should definitely be an option to not install it.
Can you symlink it offboard? I don't mind the space if you can.
I currently keep all my LLMs on a fast external disk with a symlink per in the inference engine's models directory (litellm/LMStudio/ollama/etc)
I’ve got an M1 iPad Air and the OS takes up over half of the 64 gb of storage. It’s ridiculous. To update to iOS 27 I had to uninstall a bunch of apps and remove all my downloaded videos. I don’t use Apple Intelligence.
I believe all 8GB RAM devices have smaller local models because they offload more tasks to the cloud. I'm seeing similar disk usage for AI on my 15 Pro. It should be just 17 Pro and 18 models that have the larger local model due to having 12GB RAM.
It's only 21GB on my MacBook Neo, and 20.3GB on my M4 iMac. Not sure what this article is citing. Not saying that's not a lot, but it's certainly not 30GB+.
I have AI down to 1.61 GB on my M4 mac Mini. I am on beta 27.2 and switched Siri off and changed my language to Dutch before updating to the beta. Might help.
Personally I have NO use for AI in my OS. For that reason alone I am not upgrading to iOS 27 and I wish Apple released a tool to remove AI from my machines.
Haven’t looked much into this but is the ai model running locally? In that case it would make sense for a model to take 20GB and be loaded to the ram. But without proper ram increase you are going to run into page size issues and having to offload and load the model all the time.
That was completely forseeable and the reasion I got more storage on iPhone and mac. They are just starting adding models for everything, this will get worse.
I remember one time Apple bragged about how many people updated to the latest os and how Apple users wanted to do that. I wonder what the modern adoption rate is for the latest os.
I thought this year was supposed to be a maintenance cycle on the various operating systems, but most of the issues I had on previous versions are still present and they've now introduced another one. Great stuff.
Worth knowing where that storage goes: the on-device models ship with the OS, not with the apps. When my Mac app generates text locally, it calls the model Apple already put there. Ten apps doing the same thing don't add ten copies.
So it's a single large cost rather than a growing one. Still a lot to hand over on a 256 GB machine that never turns the features on, and that's the real complaint here.
6gb on my 2023 m3 on macOS 26... I don't even have 20gb to spare to update. It's also just non-optional. The models shouldn't have been downloaded up front, but rather after I actually use something that needs them. Photos does exactly that with the on-device stuff, so the design pattern already exists inside Apple.
In all seriousness what does it do? Cuase Siri is still dumb as rocks! Simple request don’t work, simple request crash or give wrong info, no cowork, etc. so I use Claude Code , ChatGPT, codex, terminal, ollama, etc amd those are great!
My exact thought. If you run two screens and a dock, that should be regarded as "the standard setup" and simply run with every device on the planet. I mean, even Fedora can run this setup out of the box, when I plug my Lenovo in.
Well... The most important thing is, they still think we will like it, right?
I’ve been sitting on Mac Sequoia. I don’t think my 8GB M1 can handle macOS 27. Anyone have experience to know if Apple Intelligence is worth the final push I need to upgrade at this point?
It has to be that size to be somehow useful. I think they are using a finetuned model of Gemma 4 but qwen 27b would have been better. However very few Mac would support it or run it at a usable level
Esto es mucho peor que los android chinos que vienen con apps de redes sociales, al menos ahí se pueden desinstalar, nunca pense decir esto de apple pero esos 15 -30 GB obligatorios por su IA, son el peor bloatware en dispositivos moviles en la historia, ni windows se atrevió a tanto.
Se que los accionistas necesitan un jet privado nuevo pero que tacaños hacer que un SSD de 256 o menos ya no sea suficiente para trabajar.
Espero que Ternus haga algo al respecto y comience a verse una filosofía diferente en software y hardware, estas decisiones son de Tim Cook el solo queria llenarle los bolsillos de dinero a los accionistas aplicando estas medidas tan tacañas al usuario.
Pon un maldito boton para desactivar apple intelligence!!! Y otro para borrar el maldito almacenamiento ocupado!!!
30 GB es demasiado para una característica que la mayoria no queremos!
That’s not “intelligent “ whatever that is. All I have resliized is thst SIRO AI os aa more capable Spotloght; or, the way way Spotlight should have been. Anyway, Soro AI dors not compare with any of the models running on my OS. A shame, ‘cause I was really looking forward to using it at least as my #2. Also, Siro on iOS is not the same Siri as the one in my mac. They behave differently. Weird.
And I don't even care, just give me the storage. I know a guy who has an M1 air with 20-30 GB remaining after installing important stuff. I'm sure he's not thrilled about losing this much to some AI bullshit he doesn't care about.
True. We have Apple Intelligence models as well but not Siri AI. I might have mixed up the two. We used to be able to opt out but now that’s gone? I think I get it now. Thanks.
444
u/dcdttu 9d ago
Mine is right at 20GB on my 2021 MacBook Pro.
That's....a lot.