13 comments

  • rgovostes 8 hours ago ago

    There is no actual feature called "Apple Intelligence", it's a marketing term for a handful of disparate features that they are applying everywhere.

    Is the excellent OCR that lets me select text within an image Apple Intelligence? It uses local models. Or the prediction engine that optimizes battery life by backgrounding apps you're less likely to use, or applies updates while you're sleeping? What about the Latent Semantic Mapping text classification framework, which uses language models for fuzzy document search -- and has been around since 2007?

    It wouldn't have made sense in the past to add a master kill switch for all these features, and it doesn't really make sense now to have one for the latest iteration.

    • _boffin_ 8 hours ago ago

      i really thought "Apple Intelligence" is the addition of data into Knowledge.db, but i guess not.

    • iAMkenough 8 hours ago ago

      Yes, but at the end of the day they took away a toggle that allowed you to remove the latent models you don’t use and reclaim space you need.

      With Apple Intelligence disabled and ~8GB reclaimed, you could still OCR, still use Siri, still separate subject from background, translate text, so on and such.

      Now it’s all or nothing, shoving LLM weights into 128GB of storage for some people.

      There’s a better approach.

      • layer8 8 hours ago ago

        CNET says that the OS auto-reclaims the space when needed: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-turn-...

        • iAMkenough 6 hours ago ago

          That’s actually more frustrating, since it qualifies with “that now-inactive space” after disabling Siri.

          To me that means if you go with the “nothing” route and disable Siri, the local latent models aren’t removed from storage until your device fills up, with the hope you enable Siri again.

          Akin to all of Microsoft's apps with disparate Windows features pre-installed and unable to be removed from your device except through Storage Sense.

  • skeledrew 3 hours ago ago

    So interesting. Before, it was great rejoicing, smugness and whatever other related expressions when headlines were saying "Apple is sitting out AI". Now, there's evidence that it isn't the case, and there's... mostly silence, and some mild disappointment. Everywhere else there is outrage and strong feeling expressed about how Y company is slipping AI into everything, but not when it comes to the fruit company. Of course they can do no wrong; it's always the user who's at fault and needs to adopt the correct(ed) path. Funny people.

  • neilalexander 9 hours ago ago

    There is a “Turn off Siri” option. Apple Intelligence & Siri are now effectively one.

    • metaltyphoon 7 hours ago ago

      Didn’t matter, the space on disk still not reclaimed. On my macbook air it’s 35GB

      • brudgers 4 hours ago ago

        The headline was “iOS”

        • metaltyphoon 3 hours ago ago

          Applies to both sadly.

          • al_borland 27 minutes ago ago

            My iPhone 16 Pro shows Apple Intelligence using 6.62GB, not 35GB.

  • aristofun 4 hours ago ago

    That really is a bummer, especially on basic older models where 8-20Gb of space wasted on this gimmick even if turned off is not nothing.

  • hnburnsy 7 hours ago ago

    Just like notifications in iOS that cannot be disabled globally.