Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back

Reminds me of all the de-crufting you've always needed to do when you install Windows. Looks like we've gotten to the point on macOS too, where you need to run third party scripts on a new OS installation to gain back control of your system resources and remove unwanted crapware.

I no longer have a Mac as I’ve moved over to Linux, but my iOS device leaves me very frustrated that I can no longer disable this AI stuff with a simple toggle.

It seems insane given that Apple’s competitors (Microsoft, Firefox, probably others) moved toward a global AI switch to make the choice easy for their customers.

This is stuff on the level of O&O ShutUp10. Which is a good tool, but also, a Windows tool for very (back in the day) Windows-specific nonsense.

What's going on at Apple product strategy?

It's nice that the tool is open source tool. You can actually see what it's doing and not end up downloading something sketchy

What worries me is that Apple might to be heading in a bit of a bloatware direction with this stuff. Having to give up tens of GB of storage for an AI model that I may not even use feels pretty far from the old Apple approach of keeping the OS lean

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.

The enshittification of Apple is going on. Debloating Windows, degoogling Android. MacOS/iOS was still decent a few months ago. And now they've put banners on iPhones, real advertisements trying to force you to subscribe to Apple This, Apple That. And you can't close the banner. Now they remove the option for you to remove the models. And Apple storage space is darn expensive. Now we have to use a 3rd-party tool to debloat Apple's OS too? To hell with that. Is this really the year to go full-time Linux? Steve must be squirming down there with the enshittification of Apple too. Let's shove AI (SI is different stuff, Bozo) down your throats. Jesus Christ. I suppose that's what the board members want. More revenue. Maybe it's time to start parting ways with Apple if they keep it like that. Corporate greed has taken over and user experience has gone down the drain.

How do we believe this tool? Is it secure?

Ihave three screenshots on my iPhone taken two weeks apart. I have one point Apple Intelligence, while it’s turned off mind you, takes up four gigs of space, then it disappeared, and now it’s back to four gigs again. Can someone please explain this to me?

Is there a way to do this manually?

Not a lot of good reasons to upgrade to 27. They removed Rosetta and you have to reinstall that if you want it. So is MacOS turning into something that more regular people are going to have to maintain in the future or end up with something like Windows 11?

I switched to MacOS 3 years ago because of Microsoft and the writing on the wall seems to say I got another year left before I'm forced into Linux. Because if I have to maintain my own OS then I might as well install Linux and do it once.

> Every release is built from its tag by GitHub Actions and carries a build provenance attestation.

Huh cool. They're doing curl | bash properly.

This should have been a prompt.

Stop the curl | bash insanity.

https://nocurlbash.com/#en

this is awesome!!

Does apple not realize there is an SSD crisis happening? Used to love apple (Apple IIc was my first computer). But now? Terrible.

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Oh, things are about to get worse with the new macOS "privacy/security" measures. They are going to curb agentic workflows even more. I don't know how Apple just finds new ways to annoy developers, but we're in a minority after all. Of 200 million Mac users, probably just up to 1 million are developers, and the rest are normies who can't tell when they should authorize or cancel the pop-up.

Something horrible must have happened, if macOS users are curling shell scripts from the internet to make their desktops more like Linux.