YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac

67 points alwillis 1 hour ago 31 comments

k310 1 hour ago | parent

This applies to MacOS 26.

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...

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

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.

totetsu 58 minutes ago | parent

They cant take up that free space if it was already full in the first place..

rgovostes 10 minutes ago | parent

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”?

paper2d 29 seconds ago | parent

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.

bflesch 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

ASalazarMX 33 minutes ago | parent

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 31 minutes ago | parent

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 11 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

throw0101c 19 minutes ago | parent

> 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 12 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

reaperducer 7 minutes ago | parent

That's on Wireguard.

If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.

butlike 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

strictnein 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

doc_ick 34 minutes ago | parent

Still better then Microsoft.

coldpie 27 minutes ago | parent

Many bothans died to bring you that suggestion to make a new emoji of pizzas in a yard.

parable 34 minutes ago | parent

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 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

arcanemachiner 13 minutes ago | parent

Non-macOS user here. Does macOS not let you run things as root?

nhubbard 8 minutes ago | parent

It does let you run things as root.

VCFundedGenYer 5 minutes ago | parent

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 41 seconds ago | parent

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.

reaperducer 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

JumpCrisscross 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

wat10000 21 minutes ago | parent

Cmd-space, type, done.

lynndotpy 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

petu 16 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

pdpi 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

Mindwipe 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

reaperducer 11 minutes ago | parent

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

VCFundedGenYer 6 minutes ago | parent

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.