Tell HN: Apple not letting removal of AI models on macOS 27 is outrageous | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Apple not letting removal of AI models on macOS 27 is outrageous

37 pointsbusymom027 comments

I feel like there's not enough outrage over Apple not removing their Apple Intelligence models on macOS 27 even after disabling Siri.

I have a 512 GB Mac mini but because I have so much data, I also have a 2 TB monthly iCloud subscription. I have Siri AI turned off. Yet, my storage settings show 30 GB is occupied by useless Apple Intelligence models which I don't use. And these models can't even be moved to my 2 TB iCloud subscription. It's really pissing me off.

I feel like there needs to be a lot more negative publicity about this to get Apple's attention. More tech blogs should be writing about how horrible of a decision this is. I am hoping this post does that.

View on HN

While I agree with you, there is an unofficial (and reversible) tool which can help you reclaim this space:

https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI (to be complete: it seems to be based on https://github.com/4evy/pared)

discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49957116

I saw that yesterday. I am concerned about this issue where after doing it, the system data exploded to 74 GB:

https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/issues/32

Ideally would like Apple to give this option.

We already have had threads this past month where we largely agree with your annoyance; yet another one isn’t going to influence Apple further, as they do not in general acknowledge or care about outrage posts on HN. Support call tickets are, however, meaningful to them.

You’ll have much better luck opening an AppleCare support case via phone call about unexpected disk space usage one day after an upgrade and then asking them how to free the 20GB of space used; I encourage having set up the computer beforehand so that it has 25GB of space free before the update and take screenshots.

I also do not use them - but there are lots of bits of the OS that I don't use and AI does not feel different to me. Given its many uses and that there are people who are enthusiastically adopting it I think adding it makes sense and you can't totally remove most other OS features so it feels odd to expect it here.

A fresh install of Tahoe is 15 GB. 30 GB of models is not reasonable when they are selling machines with 256 GB of non-upgradeable internal storage.

All other OS features combined do not use so much disk space

No better time, specially with open source apps seeing a huge growth, than now, to give Linux a chance. I recommend Fedora Silverblue - hassleless, secure, fully auto updated, easy to setup.

100% agreed, outrageous. Sadly I don’t know what else to say or do, feels like shouting into the wind at this point…

I am having the MacBook Air M1 with 256gb. I won’t upgrade until the removal is possible

I personally feel that whatever storage is being advertised, ought to be actually user-usable storage.

100gb storage, but 10gb is OS and 20gb is reserved for other nonsense? Fine, but then you ought to only be allowed to advertise as having 70gb storage.

Same for cloud storage. And whilst we’re at it, internet speeds with “up to” speeds.

Seems like a worthy citizen initiative to get the EU to look at.

You're outraged that Apple is exerting control over its closed ecosystem?

It's... Apple.

You surrendered this control long ago. There were and are alternatives.

My thoughts too. Isn't much of the appeal of Apple to non-developers that it just sorta works without you having to think too much about it? That means that Apple necessarily just makes decisions on your behalf.

If they'd allow for more fine-grained control of low level aspects, a lot of their plug-and-play promise would no longer apply.

It's like the OP only watched the 1984 advertisement and has no knowledge of the intervening 42 years.

Downgrade. Golden Gate is a golden pile of poo. Took me two hours but now I'm happily back on Sequoia

Hopefully this finally forces Apple to offer much higher storage on their base models. That being said, I don’t mind these on device models because it gives app developers an additional tool to do on device processing rather than pay for compute on the cloud.

This has been covered to death already. Please search and read before making yet another thread.

We are not on Stack Overflow.

does nobody read comments? https://github.com/4evy/pared

Apple still only start treating their own users with respect once we lawfully require them to support Linux on all Apple devices. Which is what we should be doing.

>once we lawfully require them to support Linux on all Apple devices

How would that even work? The bootloader isn't even locked, so it's just driver support, in which case, why should hardware companies be mandated to write linux drivers?

Yes. But environmental and anti-obsolence considerations might lead us to require good documentation of hardware. Then those who care would have what they need to write their own drivers. (Well, those who care and have the chops.)

>Yes. But environmental and anti-obsolence considerations might lead us to require good documentation of hardware.

That might make sense for all those android tablets with 0 years of software updates, but doesn't really work for macs because they get updates for around 7 years (a few years longer if you include security updates). How many 7 year old macbooks are there that's still in use, and of those, how many are getting trashed because the user absolutely needs the the latest updates?

Apple may not want to support 7+ year old hardware but plenty of enthusiasts would and could if they just had good documentation of the hardware.

Not all hardware companies, just the one with easily the world's largest (customer device count)x(closedness and ill will)x(cash in bank) volume.

Although, now that I think about it, maybe NVIDIA should also be compelled to support an open-source, community-controlled driver stack. I mean, if AMD can do it, then so can they.

Laws exist to make everyone's lives better. Apple can afford it, and doing this would gift the world a breathtaking amount of value. There are no downsides.

>There are no downsides.

Except costs associated with releasing internal documentation/code. Someone needs to go through and scrub trade secrets.

>doing this would gift the world a breathtaking amount of value

The tiny minority of HN readers that wants to run asahi linux on their mac?

> Except costs associated with releasing internal documentation/code.

Jesus Christ, I had a list of comebacks I was expecting, but “doing stuff costs money therefore we shouldn’t ask trillion dollar market cap companies to do stuff because then they have to spend a bit of their trillions of dollars” on it, somehow. Out of baseline respect for the median HN reader, I think.

> The tiny minority of HN readers that wants to run asahi linux on their mac?

Please at least try to make points worth responding to. Asahi Linux community is tiny precisely because Apple does precisely nothing to support this and similar projects. Surely you can comprehend this. I believe in you.

>Out of baseline respect for the median HN reader, I think.

>Surely you can comprehend this. I believe in you.

For all that snark, surely you could have thought a bit more than "Asahi Linux is small because apple isn't providing documentation"? For one, how many people are were running linux on x86 macs (or even windows laptops)? Still a tiny minority. Even in computer science departments, I saw approximately zero persons using linux on mac, but plenty (but still a small fraction) on "windows" laptops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com