"look, MacOS is following the same trend as windows as to become measurably worse over time, with bloat, slop, user hostile/dark pattern, removing freedoms configuration and escape hatches"
On one of my machines, I don’t know if I could even make it fit. So it’s a no-brainer to not update on that one, if they are going to force an extra 14GB download on me.
By that logic why not fill the hard drive with OS data? This is a company mind you that still sells some laptops with a base configuration of 256GB, so 10-20GB isn't an insignificant amount to many users.
Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.
For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.
The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.
Is there a version of this that uses more than 10% of my horizontal screen space? I have a 40in monitor, I don't need the website compressed to the aspect ratio of a phone.
Apple intelligence is listed as 29 GB in the Storage settings. Which should be the amount of space you get back.
MacOS 27 is also diffrent in that it does still downloads the data for EU users and removes or hides options in menues to dissable functionality. This means users lose the said space when upgrading to 27.
... can you also force Siri off by using Screen Time controls? I noticed that in the Screen Time menus, "Content and Privacy" restrictions can be toggled on. From there seems to be an additional "Siri" menu that lets me change the allowed Siri version from Siri Classic to Siri AI as well as options to turn off the global writing tools/assistance (which turns off the annoying Siri bubble on every textbox now).
I suspect forcing Siri off via those controls would work easier than using Low Data Mode or trying to force Siri to disable via language selection.
I'll say they definitely need to let people disable/offload the model, but if you haven't tried the new Siri, it's been great. Obviously it's not a state of the art LLM, but it's good enough, and the fact that it can search and take actions on your local data makes it incredibly useful. I definitely use it more on my iPhone where it's slower to get things done the traditional way, but I use it all the time now.
"What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.
The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Since learning Spanish I get a lot more Spanish stuff in my feeds, and if I e.g. don't understand a meme I'll just ask "explain the joke here" and it reads the screen and explains it.
You can have an article open in Safari and say "remind me to read this tonight" and it'll make a reminder with the link. Or you can modify reminders - "move my reminder to get groceries to tomorrow at the same time". Yesterday I told it to make me a reminder and it did, but I worded it in a clunky way so I followed it with "reword that to sound more natural" and it did it.
We've been trained for a long time to think Siri can't do anything but I urge you to try it once you're on the new one, it's quite good. And I'm sure I've barely touched all the things it can do. David Pogue published a pretty thorough test other day:
A couple of things I've done with Apple Intelligence on the Mac:
* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.
* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.
Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.
> Not sure if I want Siri to know my prescription medication.
Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.
There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:
We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about
the way it handles user data [1]:
A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of
fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to
perform the operations requested by the user. User data stays on the
PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is
returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request,
and no user data is retained in any form after the response is
returned. User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with
administrative access to the production service or hardware.
> I am sorry no amount of assurances from any company is going to make me reveal my medical information to products from any tech company.
Unlike your insurance provider or credit card company, which keep your prescription details, Apple Intelligence deletes the data once you receive a response—a fact Apple could verify if necessary.
It appears I did not need the cloud; my prescription information stayed on my iPhone to create the request, thanks to the Apple Foundation models running locally.
Luckily I live in a country with universal healthcare and our pharmacies don’t transmit prescription medication info to credit cards. They just show some prescription medication was purchased
The Apple Intelligence Shortcuts creation is great as well. I never had a desire to learn their visual programming language so I mostly ignored Shortcuts. Now it's one-shot some really handy utilities for me.
Not the Gmail app, but a Gmail account, yes. You have to at least have the default Mail app installed and signed in for it to be able to index the emails.
Siri AI is very capable, but *I* should have control over when and whether *I* decide to enable or completely delete it.
I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.
(You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)
Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.
I agree that you should have the ability to remove AI features, but that isn't the direction Apple has followed for the past decade or so. There's a lot of stuff in macOS that one should be able to remove, or at least disable, if one isn't interested in living within the Apple ecosystem.
The one that is almost just as fast workflow wise, far more capable, has more features, is developed in a faster pace, and is not forced to the user screwing their privacy.
Our experiences diverge surprisingly far. The new Siri was worse for everything I use it for before I turned it off.
The new Siri can not reliably return the weather (it seems it's prompting on the literal text of the town and asks for a clarification sometimes about whether I am in the United States or United Kingdom), and when I ask "what is the air quality index", the new Siri would sometimes return the definition of AQI. When it returns a value, new Siri would hallucinate an incorrect and fixed value. In the cases where it does work, it's very much slower than the classic "rainbow orb" Siri.
I don't know which Spotlight search you've been using but it certainly has not been consistent and reliable in years.
And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
Not to mention these are tasks I'll be able to do in winter while wearing gloves.
Tried new Siri to set the timer when cooking- it failed to deliver.
First, it’s unreliable in when to say what you want after Hey Siri, then it just didn’t do anything, and the third time it silently set the timer but didn’t confirm anything so I have then set another timer manually to only find out later that they both run.
Hard to trust this product with anything serious when it still can’t do the job of a kitchen clock from half a century ago
Yeah I use my 256gb Mac Mini for iOS dev, which has always had enough space for an iPad and iPhone simulator with plenty to spare, but this eats way into that.
Tangentially related, I've always been frustrated by Apple's refusal to allow sorting photos/videos by file size. It feels like a blatant push to force users towards paying for their cloud storage.
Worth pointing out that the Foundational Models can be used by more than just Siri - apps, shortcuts, etc can call/run those models for local inference.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 56.9 ms ] threadDe macify Mac Degoogle Android Demacify ipad DeLLM chrome browsers local llm
Can we expect sane decisions from corpos about what we want rather than what latest thing they want to push on us?
"KDE is immune to those by design"
"Then use Windows"
I'm surely convinced!
Thanks to marginal gains on MacOs (nee OS X) the Linux desktop gets closer more quickly than Apple can pull away.
Lucky for us, macOS 27.2 is already in beta: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/21/apple-seeds-macos-27-2-...
I would rather keep my personal picture library on my local disk (with backups, of course) than gigabytes and gigabytes of Apple models.
They were the ones who thought that 256Gb was a reasonable number. And it actually did work pretty well, until they wanted to fill it with models.
Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.
For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.
The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.
[1]: https://cotypist.app
[2]: https://github.com/powtac/wtm
This time I took the plunge and upgraded, and I have to admit the whole system, especially Safari is much more snappy than before.
Not all of the space used by Apple Intelligence is downloaded model size, which explains the reasonable difference.
The "Always verify important details. Siri is an Al that may make mistakes." is the new version of "your mileage may vary".
Also, I get a similar message when using Gemini, OpenAI and Claude.
I own a "Standard iPhone" and an M1 Mac; these numbers track.
MacOS 27 is also diffrent in that it does still downloads the data for EU users and removes or hides options in menues to dissable functionality. This means users lose the said space when upgrading to 27.
... can you also force Siri off by using Screen Time controls? I noticed that in the Screen Time menus, "Content and Privacy" restrictions can be toggled on. From there seems to be an additional "Siri" menu that lets me change the allowed Siri version from Siri Classic to Siri AI as well as options to turn off the global writing tools/assistance (which turns off the annoying Siri bubble on every textbox now).
I suspect forcing Siri off via those controls would work easier than using Low Data Mode or trying to force Siri to disable via language selection.
"What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.
The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Since learning Spanish I get a lot more Spanish stuff in my feeds, and if I e.g. don't understand a meme I'll just ask "explain the joke here" and it reads the screen and explains it.
You can have an article open in Safari and say "remind me to read this tonight" and it'll make a reminder with the link. Or you can modify reminders - "move my reminder to get groceries to tomorrow at the same time". Yesterday I told it to make me a reminder and it did, but I worded it in a clunky way so I followed it with "reword that to sound more natural" and it did it.
We've been trained for a long time to think Siri can't do anything but I urge you to try it once you're on the new one, it's quite good. And I'm sure I've barely touched all the things it can do. David Pogue published a pretty thorough test other day:
https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri
Not a bad list from Apple.
* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.
* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.
Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.
Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.
There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:
[1]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/Unlike your insurance provider or credit card company, which keep your prescription details, Apple Intelligence deletes the data once you receive a response—a fact Apple could verify if necessary.
It appears I did not need the cloud; my prescription information stayed on my iPhone to create the request, thanks to the Apple Foundation models running locally.
I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.
(You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)
Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.
"privacy is a right"
becomes
privacy is a "defaults write <obscure-key>"
You mean the way that takes 20x as long?
The new Siri can not reliably return the weather (it seems it's prompting on the literal text of the town and asks for a clarification sometimes about whether I am in the United States or United Kingdom), and when I ask "what is the air quality index", the new Siri would sometimes return the definition of AQI. When it returns a value, new Siri would hallucinate an incorrect and fixed value. In the cases where it does work, it's very much slower than the classic "rainbow orb" Siri.
> The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Where you see convenience, I see a security nightmare.
And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
Not to mention these are tasks I'll be able to do in winter while wearing gloves.
First, it’s unreliable in when to say what you want after Hey Siri, then it just didn’t do anything, and the third time it silently set the timer but didn’t confirm anything so I have then set another timer manually to only find out later that they both run.
Hard to trust this product with anything serious when it still can’t do the job of a kitchen clock from half a century ago
A 256GB Mac Mini is effectively unable to use macOS 27 due to this bloated nonsense.