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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

On windows you got garbage like trial versions of Blah software.

This is a fully functioning feature that people don’t like for what ever reason.

Automatically downloading AI models into disk space with no user-facing way to turn it off is especially hostile considering Apple as vendor of both the OS and the hardware is the same entity that overcharges for non-upgradable SSD storage in their machines.

They'll rent you more iCloud space when you fill up the SSD. That's good, holistic customer service.

That doesn’t work unless you’re actually able to offload stuff from disk, which is only the case when you store stuff in your iCloud Drive / photos / etc.

Case in point: the AI models can’t be offloaded to iCloud.

Maybe someone can explain why their SSDs, when not soldered down, are a proprietary form factor and can't be replaced with a standard M.2 device?

To gain the same effect as one that is soldered down, while giving themselves a simpler portfolio of assemblies and a cheaper FRU to swap in the event of failure.

So vendor locking to make more money. :)

I believe they have a special kind of SSD, where the controller is locked into the motherboard. This is serial locked in some form.

(Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is how I understand it)

My understanding is that the controller is integrated into the SoC.

You can actually replace the storage on Apple desktops but it’s a bit of a pain and isn’t as cheap as m.2 2280 drives.

I don’t really know why Apple does this when their solution doesn’t seem to offer an obvious advantage. They aren’t faster than existing solutions or anything like that.

Vendor lock-in increases their profit margins. If people could purchase a 128GB Mac mini and install their own 2TB drives they wouldn't make as much money.

Longer traces and contact connectors require more power and generate more heat to maintain the same level of signal integrity as shorter traces and soldered connections. All modern Apple hardware is downstream of its phone division. They don't make a specialty PC that runs a very different O/S (macOS instead of Windows) anymore, they make a scaled-up phone that runs a slightly different O/S (macOS instead of iOS) now.

It’s not actually serial locked, you can replace SSDs by desoldering and resoldering a NAND chip. But basically their SSD controller is integrated into the M-series chips (mostly because cheaper, less connectors to manufacture). But it’s a very specialized process

I think most consumers would happily pay a bit extra for these controllers if it meant that they could manually upgrade their SSDs. I can’t help but have the feeling that it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable.

I don’t think the benefits are the same as with their RAM being part of their SoC, as that gives them real speed improvements, right?

I disagree. I think 90% or more wouldn't care.

Indeed,

> manually upgrade

or “average Apple customer”, pick one

btw something beautiful about the YouTube videos of shops in China doing those SSD deletes with the power tools

I'd be amazed if even 1% care

> it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable

On the other hand, I’m happily banging away on my ca. 2020 M1 MacBook Pro. It just got a warranty service, free to me, that replaced the screen. It will probably get replaced around 2030. That simply isn’t the norm with the alternatives.

The hypothesis that this is self serving isn’t supported by the evidence. Instead it’s more parsimonious to conclude that this is Apple being Apple with pushing design to the limit when it comes to executing a vision. User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.

> User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.

Macs were quite repairable and most parts were replaceable until ~2012. So it’s hard to blame Jobs for that.

> Macs were quite repairable and most parts were replaceable until ~2012. So it’s hard to blame Jobs for that

Not "blaming" because I'm not convinced it's the wrong move. Soldering memory directly onto the logic board has advantages relative to a fully-encapsulated drive.

Apple learned this, in part, from designing the iPhone. And Jobs always had this penchant for pushing design to its limits even when it sacrifices conventional (and in some cases, probably necessary) functional requirements.

What I am convinced about is the lunacy of the planned-obsolescence argument. The longevity of Apple's products simply doesn't support it.

I've had good luck with AppleCare and warranty service, and most of my Macbook's have lasted well.

On the other hand my sons 2021 Mac Mini M1 with an estimated < 20% writes remaining on the SSD is not looking very cool. In fact, rather disappointing and the computer will be junk soon due to the SSD only.

> User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned

Steve Jobs literally got up on stage and proudly showed off the PowerMac G3 with a side door you could hinge down to open up the machine as it was running.

It was once Jony Ive got more power that everything went to pot. The first Macs with soldered-in storage were released after Jobs' death.

They could easily give us a system that can be easily upgraded. At least the SSD.

And I would inmediately put an order for a 256GB Mac Studio with 1TB SSD, if I were to know that SSD can be upgraded later on. I dont even mind if I have to buy premium SSD upgrades from Apple.

But locking the system in and knowing the decision is final? No thanks. And no way I am shelling 18k or whatever outrageous sum they ask for 8 extra TB.

It might be they are leaving money off the table with their greed.

Note that before the Mac mini socketed SSDs, Retina MacBook Pros had socketed SSDs as well. They were not standard M.2 either though, you had to get specific aftermarket parts from the likes of OWC

My understanding is that they are not SSDs - they lack a disk controller, instead providing flash memory more directly to the SoC

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but what you're calling "good, holistic customer service" is more commonly described as "inventing a problem and then selling you the solution".

Google is doing the same on Android - there's no native tool to search for large images and videos by date. There's a Purchase Google Cloud Storage type of header that pops up when you start to get full, and you can delete whatever is quick to find or remember to delete, like WhatsApp media, which you find through an annoying directory structure with a broken tool. It's terrible.

Gosh, maybe there are two companies that are both doing the same bad thing, rather than the thing being good?

> Google is doing the same on Android - there's no native tool to search for large images and videos by date

This is completely untrue.

Android Files app.

I just went to the very top, selected images and videos, and set a custom date. (And then sorted by filesize)

Like it or not, Siri is one of the features of macOS and has been for a long time. It's not just some arbitrary AI model that Apple decided to store on your disk.

“Siri” has existed for a long time, yes. Apple Intelligence, not so much. It really is just an arbitrary AI model, since I’ve had Siri for a decade and not needed whatever this extra 13GB model is.

You've had a previous version of Siri for a decade that didn't do what the current version of Siri does. Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified – it's what Siri needs to do what Apple wants it to do.

> Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified

Huh.. well yeah, who cares what users need or want. Perfect attitude for a company making money by selling products to consumers.

If you say so.

And yet somehow they managed to not take up 12 GB of disk space that required running multiple manual steps to get back for a while.

Superfluous details

The majority of Macs sold have tiny SSDs. So not really.

My impression was that the comment you're responding to was intended ironically, but I've been wrong about this sort of thing before

macos has tons for features. you expect them to provide a way for users individually turn off each feature in the os ?

Many arbitrary features can be turned off: I haven't turned on Siri on a phone for many years, because the utility was minimal vs the annoyance of errors in voice activation. Taking very significant space in your drive is just as important. I can uninstall Pages and Garage Band. I should be able to uninstall apple intelligence

  I can uninstall Pages and Garage Band.

Not Chess.app though!

Its no one independent app like garage band though. Like safari has features baked into it that use it ( eg: creating extensions with text)

If it consumes valuable disk space (especially with current insane market prices), yes.

To be fair.. why not?

Yes. I'm sure these overpaid minds apple can come up with a package manager and dependency system system. It's not rocket science. A lot of force-fed features should actually be on-demand installable rather than baked in.

Meanwhile, other people are complaining about companies making you rely on cloud compute for AI. The exciting thing about Apple Intelligence is the prospect of writing apps with the assumption that it exists on everyone’s computer.

You can’t assume that though, Apple Intelligence is not supported on everyone’s computer

Apple Intelligence, for better or worse, runs on every Apple silicon Mac. Any machine which can run macOs 27 can run the local models. Some machines may run better local models if they gave 12+GB of ram, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Apple Intelligence is not supported universally.

In this context we are talking about macOS 27. If your app requires 27, then it can correctly assume every machine will work.

there's a third option youre missing here that people are consistent on: AI shpuld be opt in and nothing prevents opt in being default. AI isnt reliable or universally useful enough to include it defacto.

Disk space is there to be used.

Are these files particularly hard to clean out if your disk is getting full and you need the space?

Particularly hard for who? Why hard at all for anyone? Don't let the overtone window to slip.

How about stop deciding for me. I love to see my disk free space.

So true, also unused RAM is wasted RAM!

People have been doing the same thing with Cortana on Windows for ages. "Debloating" tools don't primarily target OEM add-ons like free trials of this or that; they very much target Windows components.

Cortana was heavily integrated with bing. It was essentially a way to get people to use bing.

I swear didn't they lose a big antitrust case for doing this once already?

When have any antitrust cases have had any effect on Microsoft?

IIRC, the antitrust case against them (or a planned antitrust case) caused them to invest in apple, so they actually have a competitor, thus bringing the resurgence of apple in the early naughts

Fully functional feature consuming multiple gigabytes of storage and has questionable functional value. Maybe people don't want bloated AI crap on their desktops?

I’m not making any judgement on whether you should or should not like the feature.

I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine. They were all trials.

> I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. [...] They were all trials.

Except it isn't and they weren't. MS Windows never came with trials, it came with shortcuts. OEMs bundled with their Windows image more of their (crap) full software than trials.

And to this day debloating tools are tasked with removing full MS bundled (or auto installed) software like Teams, Outlook, DevHome, Copilot, M365, Recall, etc. So exactly the same problem as Apple Intelligence. Whether you consider it useful is up to you. Whether it's bundled is up to Apple.

Fair point. It was OEMs. But that’s normally how you got windows. I don’t use windows much these days so I have no idea what the modern annoyances are.

> [On Windows] Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine.

So the only difference is that the vendor here is Apple itself. Honestly, not seeing much difference.

“Some people” arguments always hold true.

Old classmates back in the day used to hate the 128 × 128 px icons macOS shipped. A waste of space for eye candy.

12 GB is at most 4.68% of your Mac. Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value, as is consumerizing local-first AI.

We’re not talking adware here.

    > Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value

Not if you didn't use apple intelligence in the first place (and/or aren't interested in using it going forward).

    > as is consumerizing local-first AI

If and only if there is actual demand for it. If most users do not want this, it's a bad feature.

That’s a whole 4% of my disc. Get that out of there.

Apple's AI and harnesses are trash and a complete waste of space

Also suggesting that sacrificing 1/20 of your disk space is NBD is crazy. I have to prune space on my drive all the time because macs ship with the least amount of disk space that apple imagines they can get away with as possible.

Are you arguing that the icons did not occupy a scarce resource that could have been used for other things? Or that the value is so obvious it we worth it?

Useful or not there should be an option to turn it off and get space back (plus avoid LLM) if you want.

4% of my disk on a computer with soldered storage hardware?

Is the marketing really getting this good?

This is going to shock you I suspect, it seems to be something many here fail to consider in any number of circumstances: You don't represent a majority of anything. A majority of people buying Macs, a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against. In fact I'd venture to guess that you like many here represent a vocal portion of a tiny minority that are almost impossible to please without the sort of full customization of hardware and software you want. It's much easier to neglect that small market in favor of the one that prints them money, and I'm always baffled that so many don't understand that.

People here misunderstand just how different they are to the norm. "I want x, y, z to be free so I can modify it!" Most people buying Apple products don't, hell most people buying any phone doesn't want that, they want a smartphone that works out of the box and never fails to be a smartphone. The walled garden is largely a feature and not a bug, it's just not a feature you want, just like the aesthetics, social factors, ease of use, etc don't matter to you as much as function.

Most people aren't like that.

> a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against

As if Apple is always right and knows what their users want. Sure they are more often than other companies but stuff like the touchbar and Siri itself for that matter prove that they do in fact make mistakes.

They’re certainly closer to what their users want than people here are. You can argue minutiae, but the numbers speak for themselves. That’s not the same as being perfect, as should be obvious; this is a comparison to all of you, not perfection.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. HN and Reddit are the kings of delusion in thinking they’re remotely close to even 1% of the market Apple and others are concerned about. And rightly freaking so, they represent an rounding error in revenue and generally are never happy with anything, at least anything short of a product that would be, in turn, undesirable for the other 99% of the market.

5% is huge. And the way app bundles work on macOS, tons and tons of disk space gets burned up for each application relative to on an OS like Linux distros, so each GB doesn't go as far in the first place.

It's also not the full extent of disk usage by built-in apps which aren't removable by normal means on macOS. An empty macOS installation is like 35 GB. NixOS is not known for being particularly space efficient, but 30-40 GB is how much space I use on it for the OS and all applications, including a ton of developer tools, on my graphical systems. For the base OS with a full fat desktop environment, most Linux distros have you looking at less than 10 GB. So this comes as a massive increase on an OS that already burns a ton of disk space before you even get to touch it.

True. In a highly tweakable / customizable OS you only get what you want. But you first need to understand what that means.

If you understand what that means, you can strip down any OS to the bone and will still be productive with it.

Local LLM’s take up a bunch of space today, where Apple believes this is valuable for their users. 12 GB is still smaller than the regular coding models, so they are trying to keep disk space usage in check.

Yes, but it’s death by a thousand cuts. I encourage you to see how much BS space is taken up by iMovie or Live Photos or whatever on your iPhone. If every team at Apple wants their percentage you end up with less.

iMovie isn't installed by default, and live photos are an option at least. Apple Intelligence requires ripping out with sketchy scripts.

Wrong. 12GB is potentially 9.4% of your disk. At the very least, the original M1 MacBook Air (perhaps others) could be purchased with 128GB of storage.

The M1 MacBook Air did not have a 128 GB storage option.

> The M1 MacBook Air did not have a 128 GB storage option.

There was an 128 GB model [1] that was only sold to schools.

[1]: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook...

Bruh the entire Mac OS used to fit in 20 GB and nothing they have added since has meaningfully improved my life, though some has made it more difficult.

That extra space is for my media.

This simply isn't true.

Trial versions are installed by the OEMs so that's not a Windows problem.

Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.

My last install of Windows 11 was shockingly frustrating but with a little patience and discipline it's customized to Windows 7 levels of sanity using nothing but out of the box tools. Shockingly, it works better than writing angry blog posts about it.

They have to give you a choice because they have surly enterprise customers who would be upset otherwise.

> Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.

Morally, why should Home users have to pay a $70 upgrade (or whatever it is) to the company extorting them with forced-on crap they didn't originally have and don't want?

It is a Windows problem because Microsoft allowed OEMs to do it and when you bought a computer, it included Windows and from the end user perspective Windows thus included this software.

> Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.

Most people including me don’t know what this is and more importantly they just don’t care. The frame of reference is “I buy (vendor) laptop and Windows comes with all this stupid stuff I have to uninstall”. It is never “I bought Windows and I just use the Group Policy to do XYZ, and then….”.

> It is a Windows problem because Microsoft allowed OEMs to do it and when you bought a computer

No, it is not. It's still an OEM problem and you can go with another vendor (Framework for example) that doesn't do that. Actually in this case Microsoft does a better thing than Apple because you can actually choose as a consumer which vendor to use for your HW.

You can install different operating systems on the Apple machine.

It’s still perceived as a “Windows” problem. It might actually be an OEM problem, but the consumer goes “Windows came with all this stuff, it sucks”.

> Trial versions are installed by the OEMs so that's not a Windows problem.

I'm 90 % sure I had trial apps on a clean desktop windows install. Or maybe after some update. All desktop with no pre-installed windows. I think it was candy crush and maybe spotify? I can't remember.

Maybe they don't like it because they don't have any desire to use it, and they didn't ask for it?

I just don't use it. I'm on a laptop with 500gb. I don't want to lose on so much disk space for a feature I won't use.

I don't need a more bloated operating system or greater resource usage for things I don't want, use, or need. i'd prefer a calendar app that doesn't suck, and an OS that doesn't decrease performance by 5-15% on every new upgrade for slightly older machines

It's the same reason IDEs have been largely supplanted by plugin-based editors & discrete toolchains. Integrating everything the user might want wastes lots of resources and includes things the user will never want.

Because Apple keeps on selling devices with 256GB SSD and this takes between 8-14GB of very valuable disk space, for a feature that most of us don't really use.

It doesn't help that Apple never understood what Siri is and how it should work.

I currently have alternative versions of these tools. I would rather run the latest qwen model or SOTA models than whatever outdated model Apple wants me to use.

On macos you get ads for icloud and are impossible to disable, no thank you.

> a fully functioning feature that people don’t like for what ever reason

I’m genuinely struggling to use it on my Mac.

I don't like it cause it uses 12GB

That's how it was in like 2000-2008. Modern Windows bloat is the OS itself.

IE is also a fully functioning feature, so are snap packages.

On Windows there are lots of fully features features/applications people turn off. It's not all trial versions and it's disingenuous to pretend it's just that.

"fully functioning feature" -- more like fully functioning forceware/crapware which holds significant space.

So, it's not for "what ever reason", it's quite a reason to reject this.

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