I will never touch this garbage and would rather use the disk space I purchased to be used for my purposes, not the industry's pointless fad bubble endeavors.
It's investors isn't it.
If you have kids, "Screen Time" is a reasonable enough name for the place where parental controls live.
If you work under the assumption that AI features are OK in general, but potentially problematic around kids in particular, parental controls are a reasonable enough place to put these AI controls.
If you're not a parent, and have broader concerns about AI, you'd never even think of looking for these options where they are.
This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
On iOS 27, it looks like changing the settings for eight different apps taking 5 or 6 steps each.
https://archive.ph/AE72I#selection-712.0-731.53
Original: https://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-turn-off-apple-intelligenc...
It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Short answer: Maybe, but I've never tried it.
Little Snitch is aware of various system-level network connections, but I don't know if they're granular enough to block the AI only.
You can verify this yourself. Get an old laptop to act as a wifi hotspot and forward traffic over usb ethernet adapter to your actual router. Then run tcpdump on the computer. You will see the multitude of phone-home traffic.
What is "root" in macOS is more or less a power user role. Apple took away the true ability to operate as root a long time ago with System Integrity Protection which walls off the critical parts of the OS from the user entirely.
Unfortunately, SIP also restricts basic system functions that are trivial in other OSes. Apple made this very difficult, and MS would have loved to do this in Vista had they not received the backlash that they did.
At first, it was very cool and did a good job with plain text files, and even a PDF. Then it munged the names of several hundred files I was working with that was each named with a street address.
Finder → Settings → Suggest file names
The difference is that you can actually not set these things up: with Windows you often have to choice. Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them, whereas to avoid a Microsoft cloud account there are magic CLI incantations that have to be invoked. And once you say "no", Apple generally leaves you alone.
I don't mind a bit of 'upsell' or informing (new) users of available offerings, as long as I get a choice.
Until you need to install an app through the App store. Even a free app will refuse to install without an iCloud account. Frustrating when you want something with a verified source, for me it was Wireguard, and don't want to build it locally.
Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
Sounds like the issue is you.
Of course this doesn't extend to obvious things like "running the kernel" and "initializing the filesystem." But in general I want to be the person responsible for running things, not some product manager 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley.
The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
Before, it was ⌘⌘ and you could type out something for Siri to fuck up. Now, we have to turn off “Hey Siri” and then click on the Siri app or meander our way through Spotlight.
I talk to my phone. I type to my laptop.
By that you mean that just typing prompt into Spotlight doesn't work reliably? For me after few words "Ask Siri" is first result.
The storage medium tracks whether a cell or sector is overwritable. The filesystem tracks whether a block is allocated. And the OS tracks whether a cache is evictable.
At what layer do you consider the space “claimed”?
- Not enough space to update iOS without a computer tether, even though there would have been if that ~13GB on my phone was actually freed up. Instead I had to delete several GB on my phone.
- Recordings stopping due to lack of space, and again the 13GB LLM model on my phone was not removed before running into this.
I'm actually not where if/when I'll ever get my space back, and this is on iOS 26. It takes up even more space on iOS 27, and I don't have enough free space to waste on my 256GB phone.
It makes large allocations fail which would have otherwise succeeded.
"When you need it" is a state you can only enter into, AFAICT, when you approach the limit gradually, not abruptly.