I don't understand why you would want to remove well-balanced and relatively small local-inference models that ship with every mac.
Sure, not frontier levels but fine for basic tasks and they are off-the-cloud.
Sure, not frontier levels but fine for basic tasks and they are off-the-cloud.
If you can’t control something so basic about your computer such as removing things you don’t want how can you be sure it’s acting in your interests in general?
Resistors used like that are notorious for being both large, and getting hot when used. Both things that are tricky to cram into a small handheld device.
You also have to wonder what the point of doing all this faffing is. Mobile phone batteries are optimised for energy density above almost anything else, which comes with tradeoffs, include much more rapid natural degradation overtime that can’t be reduced or limited by gentle charging cycles. A phones battery is basically guaranteed to be unhealthy after 4-5 years regardless of what you do or don’t do.
Just because two batteries have the same basic chemistry (Lithium-ion of example), doesn’t mean their behaviour is the same. There’s a lot of possible customisation and tweaking within that single chemistry envelope.
My personal experience is that modern devices are far better about battery management, my phones used to wear out much sooner than 5 years back when smartphones were a new concept and Li-Ion was new and fancy tech. So all that "faffing" seems to be doing something useful, because even my quite old and forgotten tablet that I forget to charge seems to be doing quite well.
An alternative is to reckon the percentage relative to the design capacity, so that a full charge can be less than 100%. That's what the i3 window manager's status bar shows by default, for example: https://i3wm.org/docs/i3status.html#_battery
So the extremes at top and the bottom are easy to detect, but the middle is hard.
Coulomb counters are often used to keep track of state-of-charge around the middle, but they don't keep track of battery aging, self-discharge, or some other stuff. So an occasional trip up to 100% is a useful calibration function.
If the top (100%) SoC of a cell was, say, 4.2v at the beginning of its life, then it's still 4.2v near the end. That part doesn't change as time moves on and things age.
And yeah: Cell longevity is maximized by avoiding extremes in charge state, but that's also a function of the duration it is held at that extreme. Briefly charging to 100% is a very different thing than bringing it to 100% and leaving it that way for -- say -- days, weeks, or months.
It's alright. Part of keeping the battery at 80% (or 60%, or any other figure) means knowing where 80% is. Taking a brief trip up to 100% and down towards 0% every now and then is a requirement of knowing the present capacity, and therefore where 80% lives, and isn't particularly traumatic -- even for well-aged cells. Balancing is also important for longevity and requires a trip to the top.
The rest of the time, when things are neither being calibrated nor balanced, then it can stay at no more than 80% -- yeah? Yeah.
(And sure, I hear you. You want it to be some other way, and that's fine. You're allowed to want things. I'd offer to apologize on behalf of physics but physics doesn't care about apologies.)
The problem is that neither you nor the computer knows what 80% is without occasionally charging to 100%.
But can empathize with your frustration. It looks like a bug, and I'd like the machine to explain that it's acting intentionally rather than having to dig around to figure out what's going on. It's like having an employee who simply ignores the spec rather than pointing out where it's not going to work.
On the other hand, maybe we're not the target demographic: a lot of people are happier with clicking a box and assuming everything will go to plan. The risky part of the design is that it requires enormous trust in the brand and minimal hacking from the user (which apple mostly has these days): the moment people have reason to believe their system is buggy, they need a bit more feedback.
User wants to see nothing above 80%? Fine. The charging system does whatever it needs to do, and the number on the screen never exceeds 80%. Done.
(The coolant temperature gauge on the E36 BMW is nerfed this way. A whole wide range of coolant temperatures don't move the needle at all from its nominal operating position of a bit less than 12 o'clock. It's deliberate because they don't want questions about why the engine temperature visibly varies, and it's annoying because it makes things harder to troubleshoot than they could be on an old car. The needle on the gauge is driven by a stepper motor and can display any value its controller is programmed to make it display and it's programmed to present a nerfed value.
A non-zero number of folks have un-nerfed it by using different driver electronics.)
Plug in an obd reader and just get the raw number
Right now Chrome is now quietly installing a 4-5 GB model on everyone's computer, Microsoft is doing the same.
Are you happy with tying up most of your memory, and everyone else's, in order to maybe use a local model one day? Seems suboptimal.
This is very much an anti-user behavior. Certainly having models run on-device is preferred when possible, but if you don't want to use the Apple Intelligence this is an anti-feature. Especially on devices with small storage capacities which are impacted the most by this.
In fact I don't want models doing anything in the background that I didn't explicitly ask them to do.
Also, a 256GB Mac Mini literally cannot function with this garbage installed. There isn’t enough disk space.
1) They have issues with the ways these models were trained. They may consider it unethical to use models trained on what they consider plagiarized material or on material that used a lot of energy for training.
2) They may have higher value uses of the storage space and compute resource.
3) They may view installation of apps and features without consent to be an infringement on running their device the way they would like.
4) They may find the general technology and its impact on society to be concerning, anxiety inducing, frustrating, or irritating. And simply not want to participate.
5) They think it sucks. Like, out just doesn't work or doesn't help them.
Similarly, I pay for the disk, RAM, compute and network. I think I should say what I want it running.
I'm paying for the hardware, I should be able to use it.
Same for my closed-source fridge, air conditioner, and nintendo switch, all of those should be legally compelled to allow running any software.
Bundled hardware+software should be illegal.
This has nothing to do with consent. A product you use is going in a different direction than your personal preference. Nothing new here.
Sibling comments are a sofist parade.
It's my disk space, processing power and electricity. Apple shouldn't get to use it as they please
E.g., the iPhone 15, released 3 years ago, doesn't get Apple Intelligence because it has just 6GB of RAM.
I wouldn't buy a device that is already at the very lowest end of supported hardware the day it's released. It could cut the years of meaningful OS upgrades by half or perhaps even by two thirds.
It's uneconomical.
This sounds like a feature to me: Apple should provide a upgrade path that disables AI for older hardware that can't run it, and thus not download the models.
Basically, with storage directly attached to the SoC you can use the SSD as a decent-enough swap without the user noticing it too much, but if every access has to go through the platform chipset and then physically travel many centimeters until it arrives at the disk, being bandwidth-restricted by physics (aka, link training)? Whoops.
And on top of that, your typical Windows SSD has its own controller doing translation from SATA/NVMe to the flash layer (including wear level management etc), but IIRC with Apple M devices, this functionality is integrated into the SoC.
If they wanna fill roughly 10% of your usable space with stuff you don't really use, with option to remove, you'd be mad too.
Let me juggle juggle with the small space I have the way I want.
I am personally tired of Apple and Microsoft fattening up operating systems.
I'd be much more willing to try the stuff if they gave me control over when I do so LIKE THEY DID IN THE VERSION LITERALLY PRIOR TO THIS ONE.
Apple did the same thing with watchOS by the way. They forced a stupid new quick actions menu that always pops up before getting to the all apps screen and removed the app switcher. if you want to terminate non-working apps that are prone to not working, like Apple Music, the solution now is "well, tough shit."
- They don't really work. Yes, they are really bad (almost pathetic).
- They take up RAM - somtimes lots of it. RAM matters, more so on a Mac. This matters more if you want to use and try local models (I suspect even a 500MB to 2GB model might work infinitely better than whatever one or more Apple ships). Also because a lot of "Apple" things start and remain started and can take whimsical amount of RAM at any given point (and you have practically no control on it whatsoever).
- And did you by any chance miss that they take anythiing from 10-15GB to 30GB or so.
- Then Apple being Apple it might downlaod another 30GB or more as part of next update and then forget deleteing the old ones (or, again, Apple being Apple, they might not have left a way to delete the old ones - this has higher probability).
- I also don't remember signing up for this (but probably that doesn't make sense for you, ignore this point).
- Did you notice the UI? You clearly switch OFF Siri and it still isn't switched off.
- Then you have to go to Screen Time and then you have to first set it on as classic and disable all kinds AI feature there and then there's word on the street that even that is not enough and you have to go to inidvidual apps and disable every feature there. Even after that one is not sure it's disabled. Or it might get magically reenabled in then next patch/update.
- There are other places where you have to disable it - in notifications, in email… I lost clount.
- In case the second last point didn't hit home, let me try again: there's a global settings option and you turn Siri off (it doesn't turn it off), then there's in Screen Time and there's marking it "Not Allowed" doesn't disable it either).
And I am sure this is not the end of it. (Yes, I am tired of Apple's pretty shite software and other OEMs' shite or almost shite hardware).
This is the same kind here: there should be a simple opt-in button saying "Yes I want it / No I don't want it".
Not because it's a feature, but because it consumes comparatively so much disk space, memory and computing power.