How to turn off Apple Intelligence | Hacker News Reader

How to turn off Apple Intelligence

asurion.com

240 pointswalterbell179 comments

My partner got the "you must download iOS 18.3, it has security fixes!" message, and did so.

It defaults to Apple Intelligence "on", which they had already declined in the last update. So, turned it off in settings. Then discovered they had to turn it off in each app that uses it individually.

That is not good, Apple. Terrible UX.

All the other changes were just as big of a hit. Mail went wonky (the Categories view is not great). The iMessage apps list is now gigantic and many of them you can't turn off, only reorder.

Honestly, this Wall Street-influenced AI goldrush is getting out of hand. Apple used to be better than this. The last updates to iOS did not make the devices better, just different. I'm staying on iOS 17 as long as I can, my feeble iPhone 14 won't do Apple Intelligence anyway, but I also don't want 18 and its changes.

Honestly, I'm about ready to just move to a flip phone. The only feature I really need is a WiFi hotspot.

Yes, it feels like Apple is increasingly embracing dark patterns.

The fact that they are withholding security updates for older iOS versions from devices that support newer iOS versions is also one. (E.g. I can’t upgrade from 17.7.1 to 17.7.2 now, currently staying on iOS 17 like the parent, although it was possible for a few weeks from mid-November to mid-December, but I had somehow missed that. In other cases the updates have been restricted to older devices to start with.)

Furthermore, patterns like the one noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899637.

It's a disaster for Apple devices breached by an iOS zero day. A "workaround" is to track every outbound network connection, block C&C traffic at the router, then keep using older iOS-infected-with-dormant-malware.

If attackers create ransomware (instead of spyware) for iOS, governments will have to force Apple to enable 3rd party backup and restore to a clean DFU install of their existing iOS version.

Currently testing Google Pixel tablet and phone with GrapheneOS, where Debian Linux VMs will be possible in Android 16. Better security, weaker hardware, less usability, but at least the OS isn't channeling HAL 9000, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARJ8cAGm6JE

First I hear about Debian on pixel phones with graphene. Do you have a link to information on this?

Any Android 16 device that supports AVF, which includes Google Pixels, but excludes Samsung.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-d...

To some extent, Apple has been like this a long time. They broke the compiler suite on macOS 10.3. Or rather, left it broken; there was a GCC ABI change and Apple did not deliver a GCC to macOS 10.3 that could produce binaries compatible with the new-ABI libraries Apple pushed in a security update. To continue compiling C++ code, in particular, for 10.3, you had to upgrade to 10.4 and get the latest Xcode there, it had a backwards compatibility setting.

The message was clear: if you develop for Apple, you need to always have the latest and greatest, because Apple simply doesn't care about you if you don't.

Apple is not for nieches, that’s clear.

This is why I don't update things anymore. Even if they claim to have security updates. That well has been poisoned. The updates themselves are a security threat.

Same, I only update my bank app and 2FA app. For years I didnt have a bank app installed and only logged in on a laptop.

You know that they occasionally have actual RCE's right?

One thing I do not understand is the repeated reminders to use some Apple feature like intelligence or Siri in the settings. It shows up as a badge on the settings app as if there’s an update. And there’s no clear way to dismiss it. You HAVE to click it then cancel the process of setting it up. It’s especially annoying when they do this for paid services from Apple - isn’t that illegal bundling?

macOS workaround: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/1/7.html

Can also recommend GrapheneOS. It's basically unenshittified Android sans the dark patterns.

"unenshittified" The English language grows and grows. Thanks.

> Then discovered they had to turn it off in each app that uses it individually.

Technically the "Learn from this App" feature isn't an Apple Intelligence feature. It's been there since at least iOS 15 in 2021. I haven't heard people really discuss it at all until recently.

My understanding is that it basically just enables suggestions. So, ordering things on your share sheet according to usage, search suggestions, the little button in Maps that navigates you to the location of your next calendar event, etc.

It could still really benefit from a "turn off all" button, though.

> enables suggestions

Dear Siri-Clippy, you were never granted permission to spider every decrypted message in E2EE messaging apps. Since you granted yourself this permission by default, please provide a detailed report of all data derived from spidered data, and instructions on how to securely delete said data from disk.

You’re concerned about your phone keeping data on your phone, that it derived from data on your phone? At that point I think you are so far outside of the norm as to be considered a fringe use case.

> derived from data on your phone

By violating the application sandbox!!!

Some E2EE messenger apps have "data at rest" encryption of local messages. How is Apple protecting the spidered app data?

Dec 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-officials-urge-amer...

> Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers. The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated.

Do you actually have any reason to think it reads notification contents? This feature has never done anything that made me think it is. (genuine question, I’m in the EU and we don’t have Apple Intelligence here)

To be precise, there are two functions, both defaulting on for Siri, each requiring manual, per-application, opt out:

1. "Learn from this app", uses NSUserActivity API: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...

2. "Show content in Search", uses Apple Spotlight to index all app data. For an E2EE messenger, that is not only notifications, but all text/image/audio data in message history.

As stated at the top of this subthread, these menu options preceded Apple Intelligence by several years. Implementation would have changed over time.

At that point I think you are so far outside of the norm as to be considered a fringe use case.

So what if he is?

Apple has three trillion dollars. It can put in a "Turn all off" button.

Can you trade money for software quality and complexity forever?

Forever? No.

For our lifetimes? Yes.

What was learned from the cancellation of Apple Car ($10B) and market rejection of Vision Pro?

Siri-Clippy? I did not know they were siblings, but that does explain an awful lot.

Review what knowledgeC.db is used for.

Apple going full Microsoft

> Apple used to be better than this

Unfortunately I find this to be true for their software in general these days, even outside of the AI junk.

I'll continue to roll my eyes at the "Jobs would have never allowed this" trope because it's often trite, but the fact is Tim Cook is not and has never been a product guy and the polish seems to have long since worn off. Software-wise at least anyway; I'd argue the hardware has never been better.

If it's the software, you should call out Federighi.

I have thought about this actually. Federighi seems to have a positive sentiment for having a sense of humour about himself and managing to deliver presentations sounding the least like C-3PO in human clothes out of all the execs. But I guess the buck does stop with him on this.

We are still living in a world where most people think Apple is still a Jobs-era company. Changes in public perception happen after years of inertia.

Anybody who's opened the App Store or Apple News at any point in the past several years can see the design and ads are just as spammy and ugly as Google and Facebook. anybody without their head innthe sand can see the Apple Intelligence rollout has been as bad as Apple Maps in 2011, and that dark patterns used to opt people in suggest Apple is waving the same AI magic wand at their share price as every other tech company.

Apple News is terrible. The fact that I can't remove the News.app from my computer MacBook Pro is crazy. It's considered an essential part of the OS. What?

I doubt Jobs would have gone for the off-centered camera bump-out. Even the physical design has fallen by the wayside.

Only the Butterfly keyboard stands out to me as something that would have sent Jobs apoplectic. Apple stuff still mostly looks fine IMO, it's them turning themselves into a 'software and services' company that's completely ruined their aesthetic. Their ads are no better than Taboola/Outbrain garbage and are unblockable because they're loaded at the OS-level.

Isn’t every single one of their M series chips currently vulnerable and non fixable to speculative execution attacks? Thats multiple generations of products now that are fast but fundamentally broken.

I don't post on hacker news often so forgive me if sharing a link to my own blog post is not kosher. I'll remove it if so.

I've been experimenting with using a flip phone for a few months now. It's got some quirks and has been more interesting of a switch then I thought.

I wrote about it here:

https://www.greghilston.com/post/switching-to-a-flip-phone/

Disclaimer, I have two analytics JS libraries running. One is gA, the other is one I've been meaning to rip out but haven't yet. I also want to add a comment system that ties into say GitHub posts or something else. Open to any advice on making these posts more "hacker" friendly

I find it interesting that a hacker with a flip phone would use analytics at all. Can you explain why you feel this need?

Definitely no need but more of curiosity and current smith of time I'm willing to spend on my site.

I've had my site for many years and the analytics set up were set up from the start. The amount of free time I can decorate to my site and the length of my blocks of free time have drastically changed, which made me focus the time I spend on my site to only writing. I have a large backlog of non writing things I wish to do, but can't justify them as of right now.

I'm going to remove the UI tracking component as I never look at the data. It was just something I thought was neat and was exploring for a work situation at the time.

The usage of GA is nice as it tells me what posts are popular but that's really not important in the grand scheme of things. As I always blog about what I find interesting regardless of how popular it is.

So in short, if I was willing to dedicate my time I spend on my site to non blogging right now, is rip out our of the analytics tool. And look for a replacement on the other, or rip it out entirely.

The flip phone component was mostly to decrease the availability of distractions in my life. Which doesn't necessarily mean I'm against analytics but yeah. I hope that answers your question. Thanks for taking an interest in my setup :)

> It defaults to Apple Intelligence "on", which they had already declined in the last update. So, turned it off in settings. Then discovered they had to turn it off in each app that uses it individually.

Same with Siri, by the way. It's especially fun because, even if it's turned off already for every app, it still defaults to turned on for new apps, so you have to remember what additional steps to go through for every new app.

Same with iCloud, too.

As someone who - by default - has Bluetooth disabled, I can safely say: Same with Bluetooth.

I'm slightly annoyed I have to check settings every update, but it's not like it's something new, it has been that way for years.

E: typo

> As someone who - by default - has Bluetooth disabled, I can safely say: Same with Bluetooth.

Bluetooth has to be turned off for every app? I thought there's one switch.

One switch.. that ignores user setting and turns on after every update.

> One switch.. that ignores user setting and turns on after every update.

Ah. That is indeed irritating, but at least it's easily fixed once you know about it, even if it shouldn't have to be. Even when you know it needs to be done, it's very cumbersome to go through every single app, separately toggling off Siri (and, I guess, now Apple Intelligence? I don't know if that's another toggle). Fortunately this process seems to be "sticky" across updates, which is a win, but it still isn't something I should have to do for tons of apps at start, and then for every app I ever install after.

The megacorps are reporting billions in AI revenue. Does that typically count stuff like this where it’s dark-patterned in? The Google Workspace thing where it’s a support ticket to make it even have a switch would be another example.

It’s starting to seem like admitting people hate this stuff poses a systemic risk to the whole economy, which historically means John Q Taxpayer is about to pick up the tab.

Look at it as a typewriter that knows what you should say. Don't think about it too much.

> Honestly, I'm about ready to just move to a flip phone. The only feature I really need is a WiFi hotspot.

Then you could also try a GNU/Linux phone.

Can those actually place/receive phone calls (actual phone calls, not WhatsApp or whatever) and send/receive SMS messages these days? Last I checked, which admittedly was 5+ years ago, the answer ranged from "no" to "sometimes, when the stars align on a Thursday". Merely being phone-shaped does not a phone make.

Yes, I use Lbrem 5 as a daily driver. See also:

https://forums.puri.sm/t/nine-months-librem-5-as-my-only-pho...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/a-l5-review-1-week-to-my-ready-to-s...

Cool, thanks! Looks like they still have a ways to go before some major pain points are ironed out, but at least the phones are actually phones now! I'll have to consider them next time I switch phones as I'd much rather the Linux ecosystem "support everything forever" attitude than the Android tradition of "vendor drops support 1.5 years after purchase".

I'm not completely opposed, but the ones that seem to be worth the effort are still very expensive. The advantage of the flip phone is that it is cheap and durable.

If I need something more robust, I have a laptop. If the flip phone can get me decent internet, I'm good. And if I need something like map directions while I'm driving, well, I can keep my iPhone and just connect it to WiFi.

Pinephone costs $150.

Honestly I accept advertising in Windows because I haven't paid for it since Windows 7. I am the product.

But I always thought that you pay the Apple premium to get away from monetising shenanigans.

To save anyone else panicking and/or wasting time searching for more context around this: you only get Apple Intelligence turned on (whether by default or not, I couldn’t say) if both your hardware and geographic region support it [0]. As an owner of a pre-15 iPhone in the EU I can sleep tonight knowing the 18.3 update won’t (yet?) do all these terrible things to my UX.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence

Apple wants to prove to investors that users are enabling their new “Apple Intelligence” feature. It should be labeled market manipulation.

It's not mentioned here but disabling Apple Intelligence also frees up ~7GB of storage, which might be appreciated on base 128GB devices.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/take-back-yo...

Base model new iphones like the $200 prepaid burner SE I’m typing this on still have only 64gb of storage.

Which can’t run Apple intelligence anyway…

Thank goodness!

burner iphone is wild

I recommend it- with a month prepaid it unlocks and you can then use it on any carrier, and still costs less than half what it costs new from Apple. For example, a new SE3 is $189 right now from Tracfone.

Much cheaper than even the cheapest Android burner if you factor in the relative software update lifespan- most burners are locked to not get updates at all, but Apple doesn't allow carriers to do that. The SE has the same fast cpu, and long update lifespan of a high end iPhone.

Define "burner phone" in this context?

Phones that come with low cost prepaid no contract plans, and are boxed to sell from a display rack in a department store, but can also be purchased online. “Burner” because you can set them up with no personal details- popular for criminals, teenagers, etc.

I honestly don’t understand why anyone would not use prepaid plans- I use visible for example, and it has full unlimited data on the Verizon network for $25/mo with an iphone that cost me under $200. It doesn’t seem in any way inferior to a high priced contract plan to me.

I always thought that (as well as the things you said) the word burner means it is cheap enough to discard (burn) after a single use.

But you can still play DRM content on them?

Yes, they're regular iphones, not different in any way.

I think your definition is a little different from what others are thinking. I think of a burner as an alternate phone you can toss (burn) at a moment’s notice. For that, even the iphone se you described would be pretty expensive.

This isn’t to say you are wrong. Just that some of us are thinking something different when we see “burner phone”.

Tracfone will give you a year of service AND a very good Android phone for 60 bucks. Sixty dollars!

It's only a really good deal if you don't use much of the $10/gb data, and also don't really make calls ever. I use enough of that that switching to another prepaid carrier with unlimited data and minutes was cheaper.

Also, I've had a few androids from Tracfone and they were all already a year or two behind on security updates when purchased, and could not be updated. The iPhones they sell can all get updates still.

You mentioned Tracfone so I assumed your use case was what Tracfone users generally are. The phones are throwaway but they're very good throwaway devices. I don't know about your security updates comment being the case given I get plenty of security updates on the Tracfone I am using.

That might have changed, it was an older high end Samsung I had with updates blocked. I used Tracfone for years, but the block on tethering was particularly annoying. Visible is basically the same service also owned by Tracfone, but unlimited everything for $25/mo, worth it to me.

Correction: they’re both owned by Verizon

Prior to it being force opted-into I never enabled it and I was worried that disabling it wouldn't free up the space taken up by the models. Glad to hear it does. I don't even need the space, I'm just loath to lose multiple gigabytes to something I don't consider to be a good set of features.

I disabled AI entirely on my ipad running 18.2.1 but it still indicates almost 3 GB storage in use for AI. The author suggests iOS will let you overwrite that space if needed, but I'm not so sure.

The UX on MacOS is so bad here. First, a notification prompts you to enable Apple Intelligence. When you dismiss the notification by clicking the "x" in the corner, it instead opens the system settings and proceeds to download something (?) before showing you a checkbox where you can enable/disable it. It feels quite forced.

Desperate product owners resort to desperate measures to juice metrics.

Before 2010s software didn't feel like it was different features competing for attention. Is product owner a new invention or what else happened?

It's not just "product owners." When you're one of 100 teams in BigCorp, your team might own Feature X, and another team owns Feature Y. If teams with more "successful" features grow faster, get more funding, get more compute time, get bigger, fatter org charts, then your whole team is incentivized to fight to make Feature X more prominent and elbow out Feature Y.

As an end user, when you start your device or application or web page, know that the features that are exposed in the first screen, and "above the fold" as they say, that premium placement was likely fought bitterly over, through epic corporate political battles and backstabbing. They're not there because research showed that users want them conveniently located.

Raymond Chen, 2006:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29...

> I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.” “That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card.

> The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature.

This bullshit has been with us since there have been desktop computers with notification areas.

Have you forgotten that clippy used to knock on the glass if you ignored it?

It's really pathetic. Reminds me of when phone manufacturers make a hardware button stop doing what people are used to and make it do Feature-Of-The-Month. Sorry, your power button now turns on FeatureX instead of toggling power. All so a fraction of a percent of users accidentally and unintentionally invoke unwanted features.

Screams in Bixby

Looks at the TV remote with its "Netflix" and "Apple TV" buttons

Screams even louder

Streaming device makers make a significant share of their gross margins from sales of those buttons.

(That and an Apple-like mandatory revenue share on the channels that users choose / install.)

My Roku remote still has an Rdio button. Makes me sad each time I notice it.

My company is tiny comparatively (~150ish employees) and even I've heard various PMs unironically say things like "Let's enable it by default for everyone, because we have those KPIs to hit!"

I've fought back against so much BS like this, but it's just endless and I can't win'em all. Who cares about good UX, not nagging our (paying) customers incessantly about stupid features nobody has ever asked for while the core product languishes and 80% of our customer feedback is "Please make the platform more stable"? All that matters is AI, and that EVERYONE is forced into using AI so our CEO can say in a slidedeck that we've gained X% usage of our shiny new AI thing (that everyone subsequently disables as soon as they can).

It's a fucking joke honestly, this whole industry is a complete farce.

I don't know -- I don't think that there's a particular social contract (much less a legal one) between companies and users that the offering they provide today will be unchanged forever.

I don't mean to defend the dark pattern in this particular case, I'm responding to you saying "this whole industry is a complete farce". If a company decides that The Way to use their product needs to be nudged in a different direction, they can. (Almost) nobody complained when macs started shipping with Rosetta [0] installed.

I'm nowhere near as confident that Apple Intelligence is worth betting the goodwill of users on as I was about apple silicon + rosetta for intel binaries, but it's Apple's bet to make.

[0] okay, a stub launcher for intel binaries that made it super quick and easy to get Rosetta installed

The actual feature set is rather disappointing, too. I don’t want magical summaries of texts or notifications. I don’t want a poor implementation of an email categorization feature that’s years late to market. I do want better Siri, but that means more actual capabilities to control things, especially when triggered from a watch. I don’t want slow, unreliable language models that still can’t get “call so-and-so on Bluetooth right” [0].

What I do want is privacy-preserving AI-assisted search, over my own data, when (and only when) I ask for it. And maybe other AI features, again when and only when I ask for it. Give me hints that I can ask for such assistance, but don’t shove the assistance in my face.

[0] Somewhere along the line this improved from complete fail to calling, with Bluetooth selected, but audio still routed to the watch until I touch the phone.

It's really hard to believe, but OpenAI kind of did Apple a bamboozle.

I use advanced voice mode in ChatGPT, and I had a bit of a eureka moment. It is the first time ever that an AI chat /actually works/. I've tried Siri, Alexa etc extensively for years, but AV mode in ChatGPT is the first AI voice chat thing that /actually works/: I can comfortably interrupt it, I can misspeak, and I can rely on it to have continuity in the context of a conversation... and the responses I get actually answer my question, most of the times. It all just works...

But for whatever reason, whatever OpenAI is giving to Apple in this Apple-OpenAI partnership, is more or less worthless. They're not giving them the keys. I wish AI voice chat would be relegated or commoditized to being just a feature (and I hope/think recent OSS advancements make that be the case), but until then I have 'Action button' set to start voice conversation with ChatGPT.

Curious to see Apple's next move though, with the recent changes in this landscape.

Yeah Kudos to Altman for pearl clutching and holding back the whole field

Seems risky… people whose first exposure is via iPhone seem unlikely to convert to direct users if it’s useless there.

this is still how I am with pretty much all genAI. People on this site say it's great, but a lot of people on this site have big incentives to hold that view. I have found the free models to be useless, and sufficiently useless that the paid models -- which are not cheap -- are not enticing.

Maybe I'd be more willing to pay per token if I could get a refund for all the tokens it outputs that are wrong?

Maybe my opinion of genAI will change if my employer ever allows us to use it and I am able to use a state of the art model on someone else's dime, but I'm not risking $60 or whatever to find out the performance is only moderately better than GPT3

claude.ai is free (there are limits per day per account). It's not a "free [tier] model", it's their best model and (on most tasks) imo the best all around llm. The worst aspect I'd say is how outdated its information is becoming. Anything post 2023 you likely need to provide source material.

using openai or anthropic to my hearts content, configured via api to my editor, i didn't go over $10/mo -- vs $20/mo for their regular product that hit me with rate limits

Looking at Apple's history in the field, it kinda makes perfect sense. They were not prepared for the seismic shift that AI was heading towards, and the hype for LLMs proved how wasted Apple's efforts were on NPU hardware. Their GPU designs are laser-focused on raster performance instead of GPGPU compute pipelines, and projects like OpenCL were abandoned under an assumption that Nvidia wasn't a real competitor.

Altman knew this was his PowerPC transition moment. He could come in there with a power-hungry, fast and attractive product that would lure Apple into a big investment to stay competitive. Apple's executives know they're beat as much as any of the engineers do, so they were probably eager to close any form of deal and reassure investors that the hype train was still very much on-rails.

> lure Apple into a big investment to stay competitive

Not so big if as they say the deal itself came at no cost to Apple.

Apple isn’t paying OpenAI anything for the ChatGPT integration: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-12/apple-to-...

I happen to have Gemini Pro or whatever, because it's somehow bundled or free with some other Google thing I have (I don't care to ask.) Although it is a bit weird talking to a computer as if it's actually a person, I did try Google's equivalent feature in Gemini a couple of times and it seemed to work extremely well. I'm not sure how exactly it compares to OpenAI but it holds a natural conversation very well in my experience. I reckon this bodes well for Apple. It seems to me their OpenAI deal is mostly an admission that they couldn't build out their own technologies fast enough, but they certainly don't lack the capital or ambition to do it if it truly is going to be important for them in the future.

Is this different to the free one on ai.google? Because that I’ve tested that extensively and it is absolutely garbage in every single respect.

Google successfully fooled everyone into thinking that "Gemini Live" is the same as Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT. It's not, Gemini Live is a "stupid" speech-to-text and text-to-speech and not multimodal like AVM.

OpenAI's approach is certainly more technically interesting, and probably the way to go in the longer term, if the juice is worth the squeeze with this sort of technology. (After being relatively unmoved by LLMs for many other tasks, I found the voice assistant concept a lot more interesting, personally, even though I still don't have any routine uses for it.) That said, it doesn't really matter exactly how it works internally: Gemini Live accomplishes what it sets out to do, in that it feels very natural and works fairly well. I think it's clear there will be benefits to the multimodal approach of running voice directly in and out of a model for this sort of application, but if stringing together other existing technology can get you 80% of the way, it's not really a rush to get there. I don't really find this too surprising, since as far as speech recognition and voice synthesis goes, the state of the art today is very good, and most of the time computer voice interactions were greatly held back mostly by other things.

I’ve said this before a zillion times, but Siri is only good for imperative stuff. Commands. “Play this song”, “make a note”, “set this alarm”, etc.

And even that’s only barely true: it gets things wrong even within that very narrow set of use cases. But it at least kinda works most of the time.

Siri is absolutely not useful, and never has been, and likely never will be, when it comes to “conversational” use cases, like asking it questions or getting advice, etc.

The thing is, I only ever use voice for imperative stuff in the first place. If I want to know things or do research or have a conversation, etc, I’d much rather type into a real keyboard and read the results at my leisure. Or if I’m at a phone I can use voice to text to make it easier to do this, but it’s not really the same thing as a “conversation”.

So for me, I’m keeping Siri for the use cases it works for (home automation, timers, music, etc), because I really don’t think OpenAI will ever be good/useful for that sort of thing, even if Apple opened up the API’s to let it do so. An LLM is just too heavy-weight.

Siri can set a timer or reminder for me sometimes. The rest is utter trash and it’s embarrassing that the largest company in the world by value, and sitting on ungodly amounts of cash, won’t or can’t improve Siri. The usual set of events is I ask Siri something and her response is so non-sensical and bad that my girlfriend and I just laugh at it and shake our heads. Then I’m reminded again why I never ask Siri anything.

It's not good for the imperative stuff either, half the time some wonky popup comes to the screen. Remind me why I'm using the voice again?

Think Apple are well aware they got a bit of a raw deal with OpenAI but it was the only option on the table. Their weekness and pure stupidity with Siri became a massive elephant in the room the second chatgpt was released, and then once people saw the advanced voice mode it just made it all that more obvious how crap Apple were at AI assistants.

I dare say in 5 years time they'll be up there but for now they're heavily reliant on OpenAI to provide any guise of them having anything to offer.

If you're a bored web developer looking for a project that should take a day or less, here's an idea: AI-Turnoff. Simple static web page. List out today's software products that companies are desperately cramming AI into, and provide quick directions on how to turn the AI off.

This would take a day or less, but would quickly become a nightmare to maintain as AI develops and options/settings change etc.

Sadly, there is an endless arms race in opt in/out dark patterns, between vendors, EU regulators, and tutorial writers.

Some features can be disabled via MDM config profile, which is an XML file that can be installed with a few clicks.

You don’t need to be a web developer to do that. A GitHub (or other service) with a simple README.md would suffice. In fact it would be better, because it would allow other people to easily contribute updates.

"Awesome AI Turnoff"

Also, list alternatives that don't push AI on you.

I've intentionally been running it now just to see how wrong its summaries of messages are. So often, it relays the exact opposite of the intent and I want to understand why.

Seems like with the last update (the italicized summary notifications) it's gotten every so slightly better. But yes until now my friends and I left it on just to enjoy how absurdly wrong the summaries were.

Interesting.

My impressions are the exact opposite: it perfectly summarizes everything to the point like 98% of the time at least.

> My impressions are the exact opposite: it perfectly summarizes everything to the point like 98% of the time at least.

Yep, that's my experience as well. I take screenshots (and report them) when I see a wonky one, which has happened twice.

It has to be 100% accurate. No Trumpisms allowed.

Maybe I'm just a billy no-mates, but even with perfect accuracy the kind and volume of notifications I get on my phone just wouldn't really benefit from summarisation. Maybe for a group chat I haven't checked in a while, but outside that it's not like I've got people sending me essay-length messages.

Well, I'd say it's probably 'right' like 95% of the time where it conveys a good sense of the original intent/sentiment. But, that other 5% is what is "way too often" because in those instances it can be so far off that it could be classified as "not even wrong"....

I'm doing the same. It's mostly correct on my end, though sometimes it fails in humourous ways. I have a friend who does gig work as a food delivery driver, and delivered to someone who was consuming cannabis and mentioned both in a message. It summarized as delivering cannabis to someone.

Why would I want a crippled version of ChatGPT that is only updated once per year alongside new iPhones?

Apple Intelligence feels useless and the iPhone has never felt so stagnant.

After disabling Apple Intelligence I'm no longer able to use CarPlay with a message saying Siri needs to be enabled. It doesn't appear Siri is available independent of Apple Intelligence, is that correct? Any way to enable Apple Intelligence exclusively for CarPlay?

Siri is Apple Intelligence now so that makes sense. Old Siri is being phased out.

Article has an error, Apple themselves tells you the automated transcription for voice memos unable to be disabled regardless of settings for Apple Unintelligence. I was hoping this article signaled some change in this policy. So I verified that every last setting is set to disable and recorded a 30 second voice memo. On conclusion the recording displays with the parentheses comment bubble, so I click view transription and immediately there is the perfect transcription of my recording. Now I just removed half of my follow-up on this :) because I decided to make this simply a correction to the article. But I did recently purchase a $5 audio recorder app that claims no info collected -- most collect something.

I just recently learned that Apple Intelligence takes up 5GB+ on my Macbook - I wish it was easy to delete. I truly wish Apple would stop focusing on these AI features and get back to basics.

7.1gb as of today. It'll keep growing as well.

I have a feeling that "Apple is late, but does it right" is an excuse. They are dealing with a tradeoff from being a deeply integrated and polished system. Being in control of everything is nice for creating a unified experience. But, it also means there's coupling everywhere. It must be a nightmare to change or add things, especially big things to iOS. We are getting to see what happens when they are forced to rush, they need to move a lot slower to avoid breaking things.

It's also purely surface polish. It's a rat's nest underneath the shiny, I half expect Apple to not even know how to make things work properly anymore given the hot mess their underlying systems are.

I know practically nothing about this thing. I have no idea if it's enabled, disabled, or what it even does. Have Apple just intentionally been quiet about it because they think it's going to flop, or have their marketing department given up? If it's that groundbreaking I would expect them to be shouting from the rooftops about it.

I remember the last release cycle, all the marketing taglines were “the new iPhone with titanium” and I remember thinking “this means nothing to me.”

Now it’s “the new iPhone with Apple Intelligence” and I’m thinking “this still means nothing to me.”

This is spyware, convince me otherwise. I don't want it, I don't need it, give me the space back taken by local AI.

So I have a local AI analysing everything I do on my Mac, iPhone whatever and the only thing holding back any sort of "AI analysed profile" to authorities (on wrongdoings?) is a "trust me bro we won't do it" from Apple? This tastes like the CSAM on-device analysis debacle from 1-2 years ago.

So from now on I have to de-spyware my Apple devices like Windows machines.

And the irony: My current Pixel Android phone does not analyse all content on my device!

First time in years I'm considering to switch back to Linux for my Laptop.

I recently put Linux on an Asus G14 and I can't stop thinking about how it's the same size and similar finish and build quality as my 13" MacBook Pro from 2015 but has a GPU and is running Linux and all the hardware worked out of the box (except maybe the built-in mic which I haven't tested)

hell I even bought it in store! eat your heart out Tim Apple, the year of the Linux desktop has arrived

anyway my point in this comment is DO IT you won't regret it! modern Linux has gotten so good

It hasn’t, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42767368 I regret every time I go “modern Linux” and think that people who advise to use it for desktop are either blind to numerous obvious bugs and failures or don’t even use it beyond running a browser.

all the hardware worked out of the box

Does it sleep and wake up without issues? Can it go sleep twice in a row without reboot? This is the first pain point to check with linux desktop. Programmatic issues are relatively minor compared to this.

In my case: yes and yes. In my case: everything works out of the box with one laptop. The only thing that doesn't work out of the box with my other laptop is the fingerprint reader. Both laptops shipped with Windows. Neither laptop came with any claim of Linux compatibility. Contrast that to Windows, where sleep mode is unreliable on one. You cannot even do a clean install Windows without jumping through hoops on said laptop since generic media does not include WiFi, trackpad, or touchscreen drivers.

Every operating system has issues and operating systems that don't work for some people may work for others. From this thread alone, I can guarantee you that there are at least two people in this world for whom Linux supported their hardware out of the box.

What laptops are you on?

I can guarantee you that there are at least two people in this world for whom Linux supported their hardware out of the box

There are lots of people for whom it’s true, cause there’s a lot of hardware either old and stable enough to be supported, or Thinkpad. “Old” doesn’t mean bad hardware, but it’s not everyone’s or “DO IT” hardware either.

Either way, people who say “do it” often forget to mention either the issues (both hw and sw) or which hardware they are using. Props to ggp for specifying their laptop model, but I still would like to know if sleep works for them cause that’s the first point I’m skeptical at. We can’t just logical-or all the good experiences from different people, it doesn’t work like that.

Of course working sleep doesn’t erase all the sw issues an average linux desktop user will have. But let’s be honest and not fanboy-ish.

I like linux much much more for servers and as a set of system idioms. But its Desktop side is plagued by all sorts of long-standing problems, including low quality software that breaks itself regularly or has unfixable “nuances” reasoned from buggy to delusional. The base GNU/Linux system is absolutely fine and stable and reliable (software-wise). But you can think of Modern Linux Desktop as a sort a slap-over patch that isn’t Linux spirited at all.

And when you point these out, the happy welcoming tone often changes from “it just works” to “you get what you paid for, feel free to patch” then to “it’s their project, they are free to reject patches”, then to just crickets.

A Lenovo that is so low-end and generic that they don't even bother assigning it a coherent model name/number and a Lenovo Yoga 7.

To be blunt, I am on the other side of the fence: I am quite skeptical when people make blanket statements about Linux not working. One of the benefits of open source is the ability to distribute software with few restrictions. One of the benefits of many Linux distributions is the frequent update cycle. Those two factors mean there is a fairly strong possibility that hardware will work straight after installation. Of course there are exceptions. Some hardware simply isn't supported. It is also possible choose a distribution, like Arch, where the end user is expected to configure almost everything themselves. That said, Windows isn't exactly great on this front either. While the hardware is likely supported, manually installing drivers can be intensive.

End user applications, including things like the desktop environment, are an entirely different situation. Here too, I am skeptical of blanket statements. The biggest hurdle is a lack of familiarity: most people are brought up on Windows. They expect software to work as it does under Windows. I'm on the other side of the fence. Having used Linux for over a quarter of a century, I expect software to work as it does under Linux. I can assure you that I have as many problems with Windows as most Windows users have with Linux. As for bugs: Windows applications have those too. The big difference is that you paid for them and there is a relatively low chance they will ever be patched. Granted, I am not advocating for open source software based on the ability of end users being able to patch bugs. Almost no one does, because almost everyone realizes that most end users lack the skills to do so.

I agree that issues in what you’re used to feel more acute. But I’ve spent my time on linux not less than on windows and osx (and dos, fwiw). Each claimed at least seven years of my life (but ofc windows was in the background all the time). The issues I mentioned in the linked post are very non-blanket and very specific. I know some solutions, but they have their own set of nuances (e.g. I know xfce would work fine for me, but it cannot deal with 1.5x scaling well, so I’d have to buy an extra display, which I have my requirements for and that’s far from being cheap, so…).

Yes it’s only a subset of all software that I have issues with, and only at this point in time, and only in my workflows. But please forgive me the blanketness if I say so from definitely non-zero experience and living through that periodically, on different distros/environments, with mostly the same result. And it’s not only me, the guys who see me working on it, or doing simple things on it themselves ask me why it is like that. I just say “because it’s linux”, cause what else can you say. Most of these issues are “just shtupid” and can’t compare to the issues I’ve had with win/osx.

I love linux - I work in msys2-enabled console all the time. I have studied APUE, that thick brick of knowkedge. I use it for my “gigs”, and I run a few linuxes in virtualbox and as VPS, all time. But this “DE” part, man.

Thinkpad T480s - yes all of those work. As for choosing a distro: Fedora with Gnome worked 100% out of the box. I’ve even been able to play a bunch of games on steam without issue too.

> I have a local AI analysing everything I do on my Mac, iPhone whatever

Which feature is this? I must not fully understand what Apple Intelligence does. I thought it was just for summarizing notifications, editing text and generating images.

I didn't realize that it analyzes everything you do on your device and builds a profile. Where can I read more about that?

To be honest I have not done a deep research and I would not trust research on this topic unless it's done by a third party analysing all aspects of Apple Intelligence. So take everything with little grain of salt.

But to give you a prominent example of what Apple devices do currently (and for example Android does not):

It analyses with local AI all your images on your device. So there is clearly a classification happening here on every image you saved.

A worst case scenario: You downloaded an illegal image by mistake (of what nature whatever), local AI indentifies it. You get reported to authorities for doing illegal things. Apple and phone helps police.

And now just imagine all sort of other AI analysis e.g. on your Apple notes etc. and do your own conclusion.

Apple says: no, we won't do that. Well maybe I feel safer if the technology for allowing to do such things is not even on my device or activated at all. The line of protection of my privacy lies a little bit too much in Apple's hands in my opinion. I don't like it and I don't trust on device AI.

You know this isn’t limited to AI. For example just having the option of iCloud could mean your data could sync unencrypted to Apples hands even without turning it on - if Apple were to be surreptitious.

So in that regard I don’t see why AI is the new boogeyman.

You’d think that with all the articles online repeatedly teaching people to disable this crap, the companies would have taken a hint. Save face (and money) by not shoving this down everyone’s throats.

Just make a prompt, your OS is full of them already and you do it for other features. When installing the new version, show a notification or whatever with:

  Apple Intelligence is here!

  [Try It Now]  [Maybe Later]

Yes, yes, I know many of us would rather have a [Fuck You, Get This Shit out of My Face and Never Ask Me Again] button, but I’m trying to be realistic here about something they could plausibly implement.

The inability to say no is the pattern I loathe the most in modern software. Fuck you, this is still my computer, stop removing my agency.

I don't think this is a "modern" phenomenon. Proprietary software has been doing this for ages. And the web is also full of user-hostile tracking with questionable cookie-dialogs.

If it's an option for you, consider Linux or one of the BSDs and the associated software ecosystems.

The problem is the oblivious users who aren't tech savvy. Enable a feature like this by default for every user, and you've got a big chunk of people "using" it, which leads to some product manager or sales person or whatever somewhere deep in the pits of the hell that is the corporate ladder getting a nice bonus and possibly a raise.

It's precisely why we need more stringent regulation that kills any kind of bullshit like this. Leave my fucking device alone you vultures.

I see this take all the time and it's absurd. You would have every new feature in a piece of software disabled by default? There's no conspiracy to game metrics with this, anything you would seriously consider shipping default-off you would just not ship.

I agree the take is absurd for this situation, because they wouldn’t give such prominence to a feature created by a random product manager or sales person.

That said, I disagree you shouldn’t consider shipping things default off, and Apple does it all the time for things which have tradeoffs, which is exactly the case here. This is a controversial feature that has been getting a ton of backlash, takes huge amounts of disk space, and is still treated as a beta. Asking first makes sense.

That doesn’t make sense. That idea of launching products in a company to get promoted was popularised by a Google employee spilling the beans on how it works there, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that’s how it works inside of Apple or most other companies.

Apple Intelligence is a flagship feature. They don’t shut up about it and it got its own “one more thing” section at the last WWDC. Reportedly it began its life from Federighi himself being impressed by LLMs. Claiming it exists because of “some product manager or sales person” is ridiculous. This is a feature approved from high up on the ladder, not some run of the mill side app like Journal or Clips.

according to people i know at apple, the place is basically run by the marketing department

the very wide angle lens in the Studio Display for there purpose Center Stage, which is awful, is clear evidence of this. they promote the hell out of the worst aspect of the device.

the imac webcam is superior as a result :/

I hate that Apple, which in 2023 avoided even mentioning AI, just ran with the whole thing in 2024. The iPhone 16 is just an "AI phone" now. Apple, you did not need this rebranding.

They should have just introduced the usual "machine learning" features and avoided this rainbowy nonsense. "Features," not "AI features."

Hopefully they'll undo the damage in 2026 and rip this unnecessary bandaid off.

The reality is that they did a whole lot of nothing in 2023 and scrambled to push something out. Crazy that iOS 18's marquee features weren't even out until December.

The first, and last time I tried "Apple" "Intelligence" at Bestbuy, I asked which computer was best for running "Apple" "Intelligence" and it recommended an over and under washer dryer. Its wrap.

How do I replace it by third party intelligence?

It certainly would be nice if Apple explicitly supported replacing Apple Intelligence with a third party option by exposing the same privileged APIs they use to others.

What exactly would you like a third party system to do? Mac or iOS?

I'd argue that there's no way that Apple would want to offer access to something like that to any third party, and that it'd be better to start implementing it ourselves from scratch in any other operating system.

[Disclaimer: author here] You can disable it and try an open source alternative https://github.com/sharingan-no-kakashi/orange-intelligence if you want.

Mine won’t activate because I have Siri and my iPhone set to different versions of English… according to Apple. Both are set to English (South Africa), but it still thinks they are different and so won’t activate. I am not complaining!

This seems to be the best way to prevent it from even installing on MacOS, e.g. works with SIP as well.

What I keep asking myself every day is: how would AI be useful for ordinary people? Maybe I’m biased because I only use it for coding.

You don't need to turn it off, there is no real Apple Intelligence in the first place.

Wow! So you have seen it!

"you may have concerns about privacy"

Way to FUD: these models are local unless you enable ChatGPT integration.

way to FUD, leaking data out of the apps I choose is still a privacy violation.

Is the clipboard also a "data leak"?

In general, yes?

The clipboard has to be locked down by the OS now because random applications would just read from it all the time when it wasn't even relevant to them.

Then you may be interested in Qubes OS: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15

Everyone should be interested in Qubes OS.

> ... There are times, however, when Apple Intelligence needs to leverage a model that requires more computational power than your device can provide on its own. For these tasks, Apple Intelligence sends your request to Private Cloud Compute. Private Cloud Compute is a server-based intelligence system designed to handle more complex requests while protecting your privacy. For example, when you use Writing Tools to proofread or edit an email, your device may send the email to Private Cloud Compute for a server-based model to do the proofreading or editing.

-- https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/intelligence-eng...

There is also: "The data sent to and returned by Private Cloud Compute is not stored or made accessible to Apple" - but it can leave your computer and even way between the Private Cloud Compute and your device can be privacy concern.

I'm genuinely surprised the answer isn't a smug "Why would you want to do that?" a la any time I tried to get help when I had a Mac.

On my iPad (iPadOS 18.3) there is no "Apple Intelligence" under Settings, only Siri. Maybe since I never enabled Siri (afaik)?

Perhaps your iPad isn't capable of running Apple Intelligence.

From https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/ipad/ipade5045bb1/ipad...

"Apple Intelligence is available in iPadOS 18.1 or later on iPad models with M1 or later and iPad mini (A17 Pro)."

That probably means your iPad doesn’t support it. You need an iPad with an M series chip or the A17 Pro mini.

Your hardware needs to be fairly recent as well, for an iPad you need A17 Pro or M1 or newer. See [0] for the rest of the requirements.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/121115

Apart from the HW requirements the others mentioned, Apple Intelligence is only available in the US (or at least it's not available in the EU). So make sure you're in the US.

It's not only available in US. It might be only available in US English language, but regionally I'm in Asia and have been using it since day one.

Macs in the eu can have it, iphones and ipads not (yet).

I had to change my system's language to "English (US)" for the privilege of running it.

There are a lot of reasons that it may not run at you, starting from from hardware or OS support, to being in the eu where eg iphone and ipad do not get it in eu right now but macs do for some reason.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/121115

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