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61% Positive
Analyzed from 5771 words in the discussion.
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#apple#siri#space#don#things#intelligence#settings#privacy#ios#off
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 5771 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (218 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
[0] https://github.com/tejyash/delete-apple-intelligence-macos [1] https://github.com/tejyash/delete-apple-intelligence-macos/i...
- opt-in without user consent
- on already traditionally overpriced Apple hardware
- storage being overpriced to insane levels on top due to the AI bubble
- apple hardware being impossible to upgrade by the user to higher amount of storage due to chips soldered on or artificial limitations on what storage can be installed
I honestly do not understand what the 28GB Tahoe update contained. Like, I cannot imagine what all the code does. It'd take a lifetime to actually go through it all, and yet, here I am just using the same programs I did before it, just with rounder corners and some other pretty things. Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.
The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.
The rounded corners you speak of also hamper tap and touch targets for users with motor disabilities. The rounded corners make icons and other elements less distinct, increasing the possibility of touch or tap errors.
It's not really "code" in the traditional sense
It's investors isn't it.
1. I was around in the 90’s; nothing today is that bad.
2. Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. You don’t realize how useful personal context is until you have it.
Something like “When was the last time I went to that pizza place downtown?”—it just works.
When you call the airline about your flight, your flight info automatically shows up.
I personally found WMP great. I never felt any urge to install alternatives (and the few times I did end up using another media player, I always thought it was a worse experience than WMP).
The pitch isn’t that it will replace claude or codex runing 284 agents vibeslopping for me. It’s that Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant.
It has a ways to go on some of the productivity stuff, and third parties have work to do, but that’s fine. They built a better foundation than anyone else has for its purpose.
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).
I don't use AI personally though. So when I found out that apple intelligence is currently taking up 10gb on my macbook m1 with the tiniest configuration at the time, that's massive. I've turned everything off and denied it access to training on any sort of apps and it's still using up 10gb of my 128. Meaning that Mac OS now takes up 53.76% of my drive. The AI I don't use being 12.8 of that. If Apple sold devices with large drives as default that might be less of an issue, but they don't. It's a little ironic, but I originally switched from Linux to Apple because I want my technology to work out of the box, but now it looks like I'll soon be going back for that same reason.
As for the other AI features such as autocomplete, memoji, notification summaries... I'm really not a big fan at all.
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.
time-travelling KGB operatives from 1991.
I was hoping Siri AI could help more in the GUI automation world, but it seems that is not the case.
For example, I was hoping Siri AI could create a Shortcut that would clear/dismiss all notification banners. Nope, it can’t even access nor see notifications.
I have my own scripts and whatnot to handle these desires, but I am just tired of having to rework a lot of them for each OS release.
(If you look, most other toggles that appear under "Content & Privacy Restrictions" are for similar things: things Apple provides no more-visible setting to disable; because they think you have "no reason" to turn these features off; because these features are, at least in Apple's opinion, "unobtrusive" [i.e. only really doing something if explicitly activated] and "costless.")
In contrast, I presume the underlying setting identifier, as appears in `defaults` and/or MDM profiles, has a more sensible hierarchical prefix based on what potential risks an organization would see in a roll-out of LLM use.
ETA: yes: the macOS settings domain for "LLM stuff" is `com.apple.applicationaccess`, and the declarative-configuration namespace is `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.settings`. Neither of which has anything to do with parental controls per se (though `com.apple.applicationaccess` is generally where MDM settings related to preventing employees from using "potentially insecure" device capabilities live.)
There's also the declarative-configuration namespace of `com.apple.configuration.external-intelligence.settings` ...which is a bit of a bass-ackwards use of their own declarative configuration model, since if it had been `com.apple.configuration.intelligence.external.settings` instead, then the settings in the enclosing "intelligence" namespace would serve as fallback defaults for the external-intelligence specific settings. Ah well.
Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.
Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.
Is it not Privacy & Security -> Apple Advertising -> Personalized Ads?
I am sure my Macbook uses a RNG to decide whether or not I can use touch ID to unlock.
What does the toggle on for "Image creation" mean? Is that now restricted? Or is toggle off mean it is restricted?
They already gave idea with client side scanning and now UK government will mandate that.
The next step is conversations.
This is obviously intentional.
For instance (this is just sequoia, but same for ios) searching for "improve" finds:
"improve assistive voice features" (I turned it off)
and diagnostic & usage data with: "improve siri & dictation" (I turned it off)
but under spotlight, it doesn't find "help apple improve search" (I turned that off too)
- Accessibility > Siri > Siri Speaking Rate
or
- Siri > Voice
Because in iOS 27 these two are absolutely not the same thing, and the one you probably want is the latter.
Not sure what went wrong for you, these results seem pretty much on point.
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.
And of course the referenced settings despite being under the Screen Time top level settings are still within a sub-section there called specifically "Content & Privacy". So the quick answer is obviously not the correct answer.
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.
It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Not to say they wouldn't try...
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...
I think my M5 will say on 26 as long as humanly possible.
There isn't iOS in the menu at all but it'll say confidently like it is and you'll be triple checking yourself for 5 min like a complete idiot
Instructions:
1. Change Siri to a different language than your phone (can be Australian or UK English or Canada if you have set to US English or similar)
2. Setup Screen Time content restrictions. Restrict Siri to "Classic Siri" only. In the same page you can disable additional AI features (like the ChatGPT extension)
3. Turn phone on and off.
4. Disable Siri in its own settings if wanted or keep Classic Simpleton Siri that can still set alarms
5. Sometimes you have to wait an hour for it to delete the actual files.
6. (Optional) plug in via USB-C cable to a computer and "sync settings" to get it to try to clear some kind of iOS cache (Mac or Windows - on windows you need the Apple System Manager or whatever it's called that's in the Windows Store)
That title in itself is a good indicator of how they think of consent. If instead it was:
"Turn on and enable access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac"
I suspect there would be far less anger from the users.
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.
> 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.
Also keep in mind that https://www.obdev.at/blog/a-hole-in-the-wall/ and its subsequent patch https://support.apple.com/en-us/102445 refers to things that bypass the firewall. There are things on your Mac that simply won't function if you block them from phoning home, making your OS an unusable mess.
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.
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.
Through my own usage of Little Snitch, it appears that all the iCloud-related features use individual binaries and that iCloud connections go to specific hosts for specific use cases (e.g. pxxx-contacts.icloud.com, pxxx-quota.icloud.com, pxxx-caldav.icloud.com). I'd assume the AI features are the same - specific hosts and binaries that I can block.
What's the thinking behind that?
Because I’d guess nearly everyone wants the new Siri to just be there and working.
And there is certainly also a contingent of young people (especially) who dislike generative AI on ideological/moral/environmental grounds. That group may be overrepresented online, but it does exist.
> In one model, for example, Apple worked to determine how the “less seamless experience” of using a non-IAP method would lead customers to abandon their transactions. By modeling where this tipping point was, Apple was able to determine when the links would stop being an advantage to developers, which would push them back to using IAP.
> Apple also found that more restrictive rules around the placement and formatting of the links themselves could reduce the number of apps that decided to implement these outside links.
> Lawyers suggested Cook himself was involved with how the warning to App Store customers would appear, recommending an update to the text that appears when the external links were clicked. In one version, that link warned customers they were “no longer transacting with Apple.” Later, the link was updated to subtly suggest there could be privacy or security risks with purchases made on the web.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...
Clearly a poor buy on my part
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.
I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
Sounds like the issue is you.
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.
WG has MSI/EXE installers for Windows:
* https://download.wireguard.com/windows-client/
Not sure why they can't pave PKG/DMG files for macOS. As an open source example, MacPorts uses PKG:
* https://www.macports.org/install.php
On my work laptop I don't think I've installed anything from the Mac AppStore (Xcode is available from AppStore and (last I checked) as a downloadable XIP too.)
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.
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.
Should your computer automatically build search indexes for your files? For most people, fast search is more useful than the disk space this takes up, but it would be doing something you didn't explicitly invoke.
Should your computer turn on global spell check (and even basic auto correct) for text fields? Again, you didn't invoke it explicitly, but most people probably think it's a good idea.
So you might say "well anything that just runs locally is ok" but even that's thorny. Obviously much of the AI stuff apple has been implementing is running locally and some of it has been around for a while (image classification in Photos for example). But not everyone wants the AI, even with local models.
And then there's things like "should your computer default to using NTP time?", again most people would probably say yes, especially given how important accurate time is for modern computer security. But it requires your computer doing network requests to make it work.
"Should your computer automatically check for updates?", again for most people the answer is probably "yes it should". But again it requires your computer to do network requests to make it all work.
"Should your computer automatically scan for malware?", probably yes it should, but keeping those malware lists up to date is going to require network requests and access.
There's always a tension between "being helpful and useful out of the box" and "doing stuff the OS vendor wants".
Anyone who wants an OS that does nothing out of the box is always free to grab any x86 box and install ArchLinux on it, but most people don't do that for the same reason that Spacemacs / Doom Emacs is more popular than a raw emacs install, and things like Sublime, or Notepad++ are more popular than those. Defaults matter a lot.
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.
There's clearly an agenda to double down on stripping away all remaining privacy. The internet as we knew it and remembered as free is just the medium to make that happen, if not purely a byproduct of this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112
Apple's reputation of being highly secure was shattered by Operation Triangulation. This complex back door allowed the hacker the ability to utilize the on-device AI to sift through data.
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.
Is my Mac doing something wrong here? Anyway to see what's inside?
https://i.imgur.com/YRQiaVm.png
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250010335
(I have a Macbook that I use for various things. Other than lack of access to the Apple Store, I don't feel like I'm missing anything from not having an iCloud account.)
I think the App Store sign in is separate from iCloud btw.
Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.
Uncheck Siri
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.
In this regard, Apple did not learn from the free U2 album they automatically added to everyone's iTunes account at no charge.
There was enough outrage at the lack of consent in that decision, Apple had to create a special support path for removing it from accounts.
Given the divisive opinions about AI, it's odd Apple didn't include a "delete" button to completely remove it from your device if you wish.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141116221641/https%3A//support...
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.
Who does Apple share your data with?
They describe it in great technical detail here (Private Cloud Compute (PCC) seems to be the server side of Apple Intelligence):
https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
.
At the heart of it, they provide these guarantees:
https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
* Stateless Computation: "Private Cloud Compute must use the personal user data that it receives exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling the user’s request. User data must never be available to anyone other than the user, not even to Apple staff, not even during active processing. And user data must not be retained, including via logging or for debugging, after the response is returned to the user."
* Enforceable Gaurantees: "Security and privacy guarantees are strongest when they are entirely technically enforceable, which means it must be possible to constrain and analyze all the components that critically contribute to the guarantees of the overall Private Cloud Compute system. For example, it’s very difficult to reason about what a TLS-terminating load balancer might do with user data during a debugging session, so PCC must not depend on such external components for its core security and privacy guarantees. ..."
* No Privileged Runtime Access: PCC is designed without privileged interfaces that might expose user data.
* Non-Targetability: PCC is designed to ensure that an attacker cannot target specific PCC users.
* Verifiable Transparency: "security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees."