When I hear a discussion among peers about Apple AI and security I remind them of this:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112</a><p>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.
I want the disk space taken from the models back.<p>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.
> disk space<p>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.
>> Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.<p>The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.<p>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.
I don't take this abuse any longer. My last Mac is on macOS 14 and it will stay there for the remainder of its existence. I'm on Linux now and I'm not missing much compared to Mac. I'll put it this way: If a move to Apple Silicon would make me lose most of my apps anyway, then I might just as well move to an OS where I'm the boss again. Also, gaming got way better with Steam's Proton and the Heroic Game Launcher for GOG and others. I'm not going back.
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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?<p>It's investors isn't it.
I actually like AI tools, but I don’t use Apple Intelligence. It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft. They are shoving it on us when we don’t want it and it’s worse than everything else out there. It’s the Windows Media Player of the AI industry.
> It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft.<p>1. I was around in the 90’s; nothing today is <i>that</i> bad.<p>2. Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. You don’t realize how useful personal context is until you have it.<p>Something like “When was the last time I went to that pizza place downtown?”—it just works.<p>When you call the airline about your flight, your flight info automatically shows up.
I was around in the 90's too, which is why I can confidently say it <i>is</i> that bad. What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then. I'm not talking about the big things. More like the bundled apps where they see someone else getting traction with something and then they go and bundle their own K-Mart version of it that no one asked for.
Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right?<p>Siri is completely useless.
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.
I’m a developer.<p>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.<p>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 <i>for its purpose</i>.
Is Apple Intelligence's local models better than free ChatGPT?
Wrong question, even though Siri AI has a plugin for ChatGPT you don’t need an account for, even if you have one.<p>At the same time, ask stock ChatGPT when your next dentist appointment is. It can’t but Siri AI can.
You can't imagine a singular person and reason who would want an improved Siri?
It's pretty nice from an app developers perspective.<p>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 think a large part of our ecosystem is:<p>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),<p>2. ???<p>3. Profit<p>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.
Same here!
I wanted to like Siri AI, but it does not really do anything that I need at the moment.<p>I was hoping Siri AI could help more in the GUI automation world, but it seems that is not the case.<p>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.<p>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.
I would never have figured out the toggle for writing tools is in `Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Siri -> Writing Assistance`
It's a common pattern in Apple products. They make it hard to turn off settings they <i>really</i> don't want you to turn off.<p>Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.<p>Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.
Apple's assumption seems to be that the only reason you'd want to turn the LLM features off <i>as a consumer</i> is that you're a parent and you don't want your children interacting with LLMs. So they put it where "parent trying to lock down their child's computer" settings are.<p>(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.")<p>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 <i>organization</i> would see in a roll-out of LLM use.<p>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` <i>is</i> generally where MDM settings related to preventing employees from using "potentially insecure" device capabilities live.)<p>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.
The settings menus in recent iOS & macOS releases have been an absolute mess.
Even worse, once you're there, you toggle _on_ "Content & Privacy", and then what?<p>What does the toggle on for "Image creation" mean? Is that now restricted? Or is toggle off mean it is restricted?
And people complained about Symbian menus...
Probably it is under Privacy because one day it will be transcribing everything you say and sending to government.<p>They already gave idea with client side scanning and now UK government will mandate that.<p>The next step is conversations.
Wow insane.
Ah yes, bad design, something Apple is famous for.<p>This is obviously intentional.
It's searchable
It (purposefully?) doesn't find everything.<p>For instance (this is just sequoia, but same for ios) searching for "improve" finds:<p>"improve assistive voice features" (I turned it off)<p>and diagnostic & usage data with:
"improve siri & dictation" (I turned it off)<p>but under spotlight, it doesn't find
"help apple improve search" (I turned that off too)
There are reasons graphical interfaces exist. Otherwise why don't we hide everything behind one single search box? And unless you are a die-hard Apple fan, you may not always know the correct feature name to search for.
If I want Siri to talk faster do I go to:<p>- Accessibility > Siri > Siri Speaking Rate<p>or<p>- Siri > Voice<p>Because in iOS 27 these two are absolutely not the same thing, and the one you <i>probably</i> want is the latter.
That's putting a bandaid on an infected wound.
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" <i>gave no hits</i>. I mean...what?
Searching for "airpod" in settings brings up -
Accessibility, "Headphones/AirPods/Beats", Conversation Boost, Noise Cancellation, Press and hold duration, Press speed, Transparency mode<p>Not sure what went wrong for you, these results seem pretty much on point.
That doesn’t surprise me. Search in Settings is sketchy.<p>The other day “login” didn’t produce Login Items. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you tried it right now and it worked fine.
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.
I tested it just now. My AirPods are connected to the iPhone, and searching “AirPods” gives me the accessibility settings for them, not the actual AirPods’ settings. I have to open the Settings app and then they’re up there, but it’s ridiculous that they don’t show in the search.
Clearly, nobody at Apple is thinking globally about this stuff.<p>If you have kids, "Screen Time" is a reasonable enough name for the place where parental controls live.<p>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.<p>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.
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"?
They don't want you to associate it with it being a privacy and security shortcoming.
Sure, that's the obvious first pass snarky answer, but clearly they don't actually want to not have associations between AI functions and privacy because they make those associations in all sorts of place. Go into the Siri controls and you find links like: "Voice input is processed on Mac. About Siri, Dictation & Privacy..." or "About Apple Intelligence & Privacy...". Go into the Privacy settings and that's where you find the "Apple Intelligence Report".<p>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.
If AI/LLMs are so great, why isn't Apple using them to better organize all these settings?
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.<p>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.
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.<p>It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Many bothans died to bring you that suggestion to make a new emoji of pizzas in a yard.
Still better then Microsoft.
Mmm, freshly grown yard pizzas, just like AI ~~used to~~ currently makes.
It's the price you pay for privacy
This applies to MacOS 26.<p>On iOS 27, it looks like changing the settings for eight different apps taking 5 or 6 steps each.<p><a href="https://archive.ph/AE72I#selection-712.0-731.53" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/AE72I#selection-712.0-731.53</a><p>Original: <a href="https://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-turn-off-apple-intelligence-features-ios-27/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-turn-off-apple-intelligenc...</a>
Apple, we want one global killswitch and a way to free disk space occupied by unused models.
The Log4J vulnerability stressed the importance of avoiding logging passwords and keys. I think the newest Log4J will be about privacy, where PII is regularly exposed and instantly searchable by anyone who wants to know. I actively disable Apple Intelligence because they share my data with numerous 3rd parties with self-certified privacy agreements every time I press a key on the keyboard.
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 <i>really</i> don't want any data leaving my Mac.
<i>Is it possible to block Apple Intelligence from sending data over the Internet via Little Snitch?</i><p>Short answer: Maybe, but I've never tried it.<p>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.
Apple OS will bypass any user space firewall.<p>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.
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.
Probably referring to <a href="https://www.obdev.at/blog/a-hole-in-the-wall" rel="nofollow">https://www.obdev.at/blog/a-hole-in-the-wall</a> - as of 2020<p>> 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.<p>Was remediated later, but shows there is precedent.
Non-macOS user here. Does macOS not let you run things as root?
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 has at least some <i>effect</i>.<p>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.
I don't know this for sure, but I would also guess that simply not singing into your iCloud account on the Mac is easier and would work just as well.<p>(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 know macOS is a private OS, but what is inside the binary blob? Why my mail client think some emails are important but not are.
Hopefully someone will make a script or small app to disable all of this in one click
How about removing the Siri button from the menu bar? This doesn’t seem possible anymore (it reappears some time after dragging it out)
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.
> <i>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.</i><p>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.<p>I don't mind a bit of 'upsell' or informing (new) users of available offerings, as long as I get a choice.
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.
But 50GB is $0.99 and I'm only really paying for it since I have a bunch of their private email addresses in use. iPhone backup with just the essentials I trust them with is less than 2GB.<p>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.
> The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo.<p>Sounds like the issue is you.
> Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them<p>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.
> Until you need to install an app through the App store.<p>Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
That's on Wireguard.<p>If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
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.
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.<p>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.
I think the fundamental problem is one person's "Only do the things I choose to invoke" is another person's "Why do I have to do all this stupid setup". Especially given that most people aren't computer people, and they want to use their computers to get other tasks done, not to be system administrators themselves.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>"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.<p>"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.<p>There's always a tension between "being helpful and useful out of the box" and "doing stuff the OS vendor wants".<p>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 Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke.<p>The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.
It's like saying that wind blows because trees sway.<p>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.
Yeah, whatever happened to the <i>personal</i> computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something <i>you</i> own and can direct towards <i>your</i> goals and wellbeing?<p>Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
Comparing apple intelligence to a service that records your screen without consent feels extremely disingenuous.
It's great that you can turn all this off but why is it tucked away in Screen Time of all places?<p>What's the thinking behind that?
Oh wow, I need to customize every app to disable learning from that app?<p>Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.
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.
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.
Every time I turn on my M5 I have to manually turn apple intelligence off.<p>Clearly a poor buy on my part
Why did they nerf the keyboard interface to Siri?<p>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.<p>I talk to my phone. I type to my laptop.
Missing from Apple's list is the feature that suggest filenames.<p>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.<p>Finder → Settings → Suggest file names
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.
Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?<p>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.<p>At what layer do you consider the space “claimed”?
I haven't run into this on macOS <i>yet</i>, but on iOS the space is <i>not</i> reclaimed in time to avoid running out of space even with Apple Intelligence turned off:<p>- 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.<p>- Recordings stopping due to lack of space, and again the 13GB LLM model on my phone was not removed before running into this.<p>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.
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.
> Philosophically, what is the difference between empty space and space that will be reclaimed when you need it?<p>It makes large allocations fail which would have otherwise succeeded.<p>"When you need it" is a state you can only enter into, AFAICT, when you approach the limit gradually, not abruptly.
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.
Beyond the technical differences already mentioned, there's also the difference in consent. The 8-16GB of dormant AI data is either on your $2K 128GB device, or it's not.<p>In this regard, Apple did not learn from the free U2 album they automatically added to everyone's iTunes account at no charge.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141116221641/https%3A//support.apple.com/en-us/HT201396" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20141116221641/https%3A//support...</a>
They cant take up that free space if it was already full in the first place..
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater! Apple has some impressive privacy technology for Apple Intelligence - including significant open source disclosure for public verification. If you trash them with the rest of the AI vendors, you deincentivize privacy for Apple and for the rest of them.<p>They describe it in great technical detail here (Private Cloud Compute (PCC) seems to be the server side of Apple Intelligence):<p><a href="https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute" rel="nofollow">https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...</a><p>.<p>At the heart of it, they provide these guarantees:<p><a href="https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/corerequirements" rel="nofollow">https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...</a><p><i>* 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."<p>* 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. ..."<p>* No Privileged Runtime Access: PCC is designed without privileged interfaces that might expose user data.<p>* Non-Targetability: PCC is designed to ensure that an attacker cannot target specific PCC users.<p>* 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."</i>