Thread

Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac

353 points · 223 comments · alwillis

bflesch · 1790014812 · focus · HN ↗
Funny how Apple has reached the crapware maturity level that Microsoft users are quite familiar with: After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
1. throw0101c · 1790016504 · focus · HN ↗
  > After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
  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.
  1. butlike · 1790017199 · focus · HN ↗
    The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo. Since 200gb is quite low, the next tier up is 2tb for $9.99, but then you're essentially locked in. I can't view the iCloud price tiers as anything other than predatory.
    throwaway27448 · 1790017955 · focus · HN ↗
    > The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo.
    Sounds like the issue is you.
    swiftcoder · 1790018805 · focus · HN ↗
    > Sounds like the issue is you.
    Oh, c'mon. The entire services division exists to sell you things like this. And they are very good at it - 25% of Apple's total revenue
    throwaway27448 · 1790025748 · focus · HN ↗
    What's your point? icloud is hardly necessary for anything.
    asdff · 1790031568 · focus · HN ↗
    It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. I know a few people who are in a sort of "late stage icloud" moment with their iPhone. Their phone started filling up with photos and videos years ago. So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones. Eventually those got full too, so they had to go to icloud and a few have basically maxed out their icloud 2tb plans, because these phones are now producing huge files and recording in 4k I guess even though you are still just looking at it on a 5 inch diagonal screen like in the 5mp phone era. The damn icloud previews can fill up your phones internal storage even with everything technically shoved off to icloud.
    Frankly even if you know what you are doing apple doesn't make this easy. Image Capture is afaik the only real way to transfer photos to an external drive on iphone. And that app has not really seen any love since release, its buggy and frequently crashes with large transfers in my experience. It does weird things like if you select 13 photos to delete, it will delete them but not remove selection having the next 13 photo block pre selected for reasons that are unclear (Maybe the devs know how terrible the transfer experience is so they make it easy for you to throttle the job to like 250 photo chunks with this ui quirk). And what is worse, those icloud previews technically don't exist in the eyes of Image Capture, so those won't be transferred over let alone show up in the image previews.
    throw0101c · 1790085949 · focus · HN ↗
    > It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. […] So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones.
    It is not "entrapping", it's providing a service.
    My senior-aged mom does have the skill, nor the desire, to figure out local image storage/backup, and I have no interest in running self-hosted solution (even for myself). Apple providing iCloud for backups is not "entrapping" her.
    swiftcoder · 1790088895 · focus · HN ↗
    > It is not "entrapping", it's providing a service.
    The complaint here is about the tier pricing model, not the service
    throw0101c · 1790096598 · focus · HN ↗
    > The complaint here is about the tier pricing model, not the service
    If you use more storage why shouldn't you pay more? A 1000 sq. ft. (100 sq.m.) apartment costs more than 500. Is there a cloud storage provider that does not charge per usage? E.g.,
    * <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/plans" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/plans
    There are certainly service for more technically minded folks that calculate more granularly:
    * <a href="https://www.tarsnap.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.tarsnap.com
    * <a href="https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html
    But a 'normie' may not appreciate a 'dynamic pricing' model, and may understand a fixed price system better.
    officeplant · 1790021559 · focus · HN ↗
    But 50GB is $0.99 and I'm only really paying for it since I have a bunch of their private email addresses in use. iPhone backup with just the essentials I trust them with is less than 2GB.
    I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
    butlike · 1790085664 · focus · HN ↗
    The pictures start to take up a non-zero amount of space. Also video shot with the Camera.app gets lumped into the "Photos" partition of iCloud, so it becomes hard to separate the large video files from the countless photos you have.

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