Thread

macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage

240 points · 123 comments · ano-ther

hbn · 1790009859 · focus · HN ↗
I'll say they definitely need to let people disable/offload the model, but if you haven't tried the new Siri, it's been great. Obviously it's not a state of the art LLM, but it's good enough, and the fact that it can search and take actions on your local data makes it incredibly useful. I definitely use it more on my iPhone where it's slower to get things done the traditional way, but I use it all the time now.
"What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.
The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Since learning Spanish I get a lot more Spanish stuff in my feeds, and if I e.g. don't understand a meme I'll just ask "explain the joke here" and it reads the screen and explains it.
You can have an article open in Safari and say "remind me to read this tonight" and it'll make a reminder with the link. Or you can modify reminders - "move my reminder to get groceries to tomorrow at the same time". Yesterday I told it to make me a reminder and it did, but I worded it in a clunky way so I followed it with "reword that to sound more natural" and it did it.
We've been trained for a long time to think Siri can't do anything but I urge you to try it once you're on the new one, it's quite good. And I'm sure I've barely touched all the things it can do. David Pogue published a pretty thorough test other day:
<a href="https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri" rel="nofollow">https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri
1. alwillis · 1790012175 · focus · HN ↗
  Posted: "Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac" - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790409">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790409
  Not a bad list from Apple.
2. alwillis · 1790014365 · focus · HN ↗
  A couple of things I've done with Apple Intelligence on the Mac:
  * When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.
  * I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.
  Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.
  1. vinni2 · 1790017508 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure if I want Siri to know my prescription medication.
    alwillis · 1790023453 · focus · HN ↗
    > Not sure if I want Siri to know my prescription medication.
    Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.
    There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:
    We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about the way it handles user data [1]: A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to perform the operations requested by the user. User data stays on the PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request, and no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned. User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with administrative access to the production service or hardware.
    [1]: <a href="https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/" rel="nofollow">https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
    vinni2 · 1790024692 · focus · HN ↗
    I am sorry no amount of assurances from any company is going to make me reveal my medical information to products from any tech company.
    alwillis · 1790045783 · focus · HN ↗
    > I am sorry no amount of assurances from any company is going to make me reveal my medical information to products from any tech company.
    Unlike your insurance provider or credit card company, which keep your prescription details, Apple Intelligence deletes the data once you receive a response—a fact Apple could verify if necessary.
    It appears I did not need the cloud; my prescription information stayed on my iPhone to create the request, thanks to the Apple Foundation models running locally.
    vinni2 · 1790053273 · focus · HN ↗
    Luckily I live in a country with universal healthcare and our pharmacies don’t transmit prescription medication info to credit cards. They just show some prescription medication was purchased
    pseudosaid · 1790059841 · focus · HN ↗
    what a cute anecdote. much success to your assurances
  2. hbn · 1790018947 · focus · HN ↗
    The Apple Intelligence Shortcuts creation is great as well. I never had a desire to learn their visual programming language so I mostly ignored Shortcuts. Now it's one-shot some really handy utilities for me.
3. Merad · 1790017459 · focus · HN ↗
  Is it able to work with non default apps like Gmail?
  1. hbn · 1790018563 · focus · HN ↗
    Not the Gmail app, but a Gmail account, yes. You have to at least have the default Mail app installed and signed in for it to be able to index the emails.
4. nunez · 1790018228 · focus · HN ↗
  Siri AI is very capable, but *I* should have control over when and whether *I* decide to enable or completely delete it.
  I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.
  (You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)
  Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.
  1. m463 · 1790019942 · focus · HN ↗
    Like all macos features you used to like/depend on...
    "privacy is a right"
    becomes
    privacy is a "defaults write <obscure-key>"
  2. lynndotpy · 1790027707 · focus · HN ↗
    As a side note, the Apple Watch changes have completely made Camera Remote unusable for me, a feature I loved.
    I don't know why, but I usually can only get Camera Remote to work when I close all of the recent apps on my Apple Watch, even when my watch and phone were the newest ones Apple released. Probably a bug with memory management they're never going to fix. Now, that's not possible, even when I reboot my watch :(
    nunez · 1790123791 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm with you. The new Watch update messed a lot of stuff up for me. I have Shazam linked to my Action Button; it's always been flakey but it feels flakier lately. Losing Walkie-Talkie is a big miss too, as my wife and I use that feature often.
  3. II2II · 1790035640 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree that you should have the ability to remove AI features, but that isn't the direction Apple has followed for the past decade or so. There's a lot of stuff in macOS that one should be able to remove, or at least disable, if one isn't interested in living within the Apple ecosystem.
  4. solarkraft · 1790041295 · focus · HN ↗
    > Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time
    You mean the way that takes 20x as long?
    nunez · 1790059160 · focus · HN ↗
    Better for it to take 20x as long and be right than to be 20x faster but be wrong while looking right...
    coldtea · 1790084675 · focus · HN ↗
    The one that is almost just as fast workflow wise, far more capable, has more features, is developed at a faster pace, and is not forced on the user screwing their privacy.
5. lynndotpy · 1790027200 · focus · HN ↗
  Our experiences diverge surprisingly far. The new Siri was worse for everything I use it for before I turned it off.
  The new Siri can not reliably return the weather (it seems it's prompting on the literal text of the town and asks for a clarification sometimes about whether I am in the United States or United Kingdom), and when I ask "what is the air quality index", the new Siri would sometimes return the definition of AQI. When it returns a value, new Siri would hallucinate an incorrect and fixed value. In the cases where it does work, it's very much slower than the classic "rainbow orb" Siri.
  1. hbn · 1790085211 · focus · HN ↗
    I've never even tried to ask Siri about the weather because I have a widget for that to the left of my homescreen. And it's on my watch.
6. zahlman · 1790030504 · focus · HN ↗
  > "What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.
  > The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
  Where you see convenience, I see a security nightmare.
  1. browningstreet · 1790033912 · focus · HN ↗
    Why, factoring in the design of Apple Intelligence?
  2. EricE · 1790035163 · focus · HN ↗
    How? It's all on machine. Which is the point.
    Terr_ · 1790046619 · focus · HN ↗
    Doing inference locally is a significant improvement, but other issues remain, like prompt injection and data exfiltration.
    Especially if the whole point is to have it search through a giant pile of arbitrary un-vetted stuff, like all the emails you ever received from anybody.
  3. kdkdkwjdjwkd · 1790035945 · focus · HN ↗
    He says, browsing the Internet, probably with a Google account.
    CursedSilicon · 1790047081 · focus · HN ↗
    (Whispering) multiple things can, in fact, be bad
    odkdkwjdiwjd · 1790056063 · focus · HN ↗
    (speaking normally, as this is the internet and not an orchestra) No one said, in fact, that they couldn’t
    CursedSilicon · 1790065168 · focus · HN ↗
    Why do you keep making burners?
7. brailsafe · 1790050416 · focus · HN ↗
  I get that these are things you might do regularly and feel more empowered to use Siri for them... but they're rather banal and could be done with literally a one or two step process previously, especially if you're already using Apple's first-party apps which seem to be a requirement here. In both email cases, Spotlight handles searches like that just fine, and moving a calendar event only requires clicking and dragging.
  I'm here wondering why so much extra space is warranted, or how to take it back, not so much how I can find a document with specific text in it or use Siri to do something else that was already very easy.
  One task I'm wondering about is for example, asking Siri (on the mac) to analyze a huge dump of arbitrary PDFs that may or may not have non-OCRed text in them, and efficiently reorg and rename them based on what the documents should be. This also seems like a mundane task, but requires a little more than just a standard search and would allow someone to take their entire paper archive of private business documents and create a digital archive without too much risk or work. This is something that all local models I've tried so far really struggle with.
  1. hbn · 1790085107 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know which Spotlight search you've been using but it certainly has not been consistent and reliable in years.
    And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
    Not to mention these are tasks I'll be able to do in winter while wearing gloves.
    brailsafe · 1790671427 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't use spotlight to search for mail or use Apple Mail at all, so mileage may vary. I'm normally doing string searches for file contents or names which it handles perfectly fine.
    > And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
    Fair enough, and I did just try Siri on the mac to find them which was... sort of convenient, but ultimately took longer than simply opening Calendar, CMD+F typing "flight" into the text field.
8. crossroadsguy · 1790053696 · focus · HN ↗
  > I'll say they definitely need to let people disable/offload the model
  If you have used mac/iOS (esp. Mac; well, because on iOS you can't do anything other than what's on screen essentially) for a long time you might realise Apple, at this point, is simply not capable of even developing those features that will allow users to do such things. And you don't even have to know Swift/objC for this sad realisation. I am pretty sure someone would have mentioned and they'd have realised it meant moving around a million hardcoded modules and frameworks and turning on/off a billion flags (a lot of them potentially global). They are that incompetent when it comes to software.
9. DiskoHexyl · 1790086301 · focus · HN ↗
  Tried new Siri to set the timer when cooking- it failed to deliver.
  First, it’s unreliable in when to say what you want after Hey Siri, then it just didn’t do anything, and the third time it silently set the timer but didn’t confirm anything so I have then set another timer manually to only find out later that they both run.
  Hard to trust this product with anything serious when it still can’t do the job of a kitchen clock from half a century ago
10. ranger_danger · 1790326535 · focus · HN ↗
  I just want a locally-run LLM that I can have an actual physical audio chat with to practice my language learning, but I'm unaware of any tools that are actually easy enough to run and use.
  Anyone have suggestions?

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