Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac

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.

I would never have figured out the toggle for writing tools is in `Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Siri -> Writing Assistance`

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.

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.

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...

Apple, we want one global killswitch and a way to free disk space occupied by unused models.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

Oh wow, I need to customize every app to disable learning from that app?

Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.

How about removing the Siri button from the menu bar? This doesn’t seem possible anymore (it reappears some time after dragging it out)

Hopefully someone will make a script or small app to disable all of this in one click

Every time I turn on my M5 I have to manually turn apple intelligence off.

Clearly a poor buy on my part

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?

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.