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zzyzxd 23 minutes ago [-]
I would never have figured out the toggle for writing tools is in `Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Siri -> Writing Assistance`
cco 11 minutes ago [-]
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?
dburkland 15 minutes ago [-]
The settings menus in recent iOS & macOS releases have been an absolute mess.
fooker 15 minutes ago [-]
It's searchable
Forgeties79 10 minutes ago [-]
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?
fooker 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
Forgeties79 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
VCFundedGenYer 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
mort96 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
MarcScott 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
howunfortunate 9 minutes ago [-]
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).
mort96 8 minutes ago [-]
What does your users want your app to do with a language model?
logancbrown 11 minutes ago [-]
You can't imagine a singular person and reason who would want an improved Siri?
mort96 10 minutes ago [-]
On their laptop? No, not really. I guess the selling point is that your computer now suggests file names for you?
wat10000 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
mort96 35 seconds ago [-]
And people really trust the agent 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?
eastbound 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
wartywhoa23 14 minutes ago [-]
Same here!
pdpi 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
tpmoney 1 minutes ago [-]
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"?
28 minutes ago [-]
CodingJeebus 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
k310 2 hours ago [-]
This applies to MacOS 26.
On iOS 27, it looks like changing the settings for eight different apps taking 5 or 6 steps each.
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.
psygn89 9 minutes ago [-]
Mmm, freshly grown yard pizzas, just like AI ~~used to~~ currently makes.
coldpie 53 minutes ago [-]
Many bothans died to bring you that suggestion to make a new emoji of pizzas in a yard.
juancn 16 minutes ago [-]
It's the price you pay for privacy
doc_ick 1 hours ago [-]
Still better then Microsoft.
hatsix 21 minutes ago [-]
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...
devmor 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
Lio 4 minutes ago [-]
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?
wartywhoa23 15 minutes ago [-]
Apple, we want one global killswitch and a way to free disk space occupied by unused models.
parable 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
ActorNightly 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
wartywhoa23 6 minutes ago [-]
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's not something macOS can or wants to bypass.
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.
throwaway27448 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
arcanemachiner 39 minutes ago [-]
Non-macOS user here. Does macOS not let you run things as root?
nhubbard 35 minutes ago [-]
It does let you run things as root.
VCFundedGenYer 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
frizlab 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
27 minutes ago [-]
reaperducer 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
variety8675 20 minutes ago [-]
Hopefully someone will make a script or small app to disable all of this in one click
reaperducer 38 minutes ago [-]
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
todfox 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rgovostes 36 minutes ago [-]
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”?
ProfessorLayton 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
kccqzy 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
acuozzo 18 minutes ago [-]
> Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?
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.
paper2d 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
totetsu 1 hours ago [-]
They cant take up that free space if it was already full in the first place..
bflesch 1 hours ago [-]
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.
throw0101c 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
moose333 38 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
throwaway27448 22 minutes ago [-]
> Until you need to install an app through the App store.
Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
reaperducer 34 minutes ago [-]
That's on Wireguard.
If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
butlike 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 21 minutes ago [-]
> The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo.
Sounds like the issue is you.
swiftcoder 7 minutes ago [-]
> 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
ASalazarMX 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
arcanemachiner 37 minutes ago [-]
> The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke.
The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.
Terr_ 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 23 minutes ago [-]
Comparing apple intelligence to a service that records your screen without consent feels extremely disingenuous.
JumpCrisscross 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
petu 42 minutes ago [-]
> meander our way through Spotlight
By that you mean that just typing prompt into Spotlight doesn't work reliably? For me after few words "Ask Siri" is first result.
JumpCrisscross 10 minutes ago [-]
It’s a laggy modal. For the operating system’s native-sometimes-local AI, I’d have expected something snappier.
wat10000 47 minutes ago [-]
Cmd-space, type, done.
lynndotpy 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
wat10000 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 9 minutes ago [-]
> does as long as you've typed something that doesn't match an app
A check which, at least on my beloved 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, involves a noticeable delay.
Mindwipe 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
rvz 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
What does the toggle on for "Image creation" mean? Is that now restricted? Or is toggle off mean it is restricted?
Not sure what went wrong for you, these results seem pretty much on point.
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.
It's investors isn't it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Not to say they wouldn't try...
What's the thinking behind that?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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”?
- 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.
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.
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.
Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
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
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.
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
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.
By that you mean that just typing prompt into Spotlight doesn't work reliably? For me after few words "Ask Siri" is first result.
A check which, at least on my beloved 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, involves a noticeable delay.
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.