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

598 points · 411 comments · privacyisntdead

  1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
    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?

    1. userbinator · · focus · HN ↗
      It's interesting to see more customisation tools appearing for macOS, as just a few years ago I was looking for ways to strip down the OS (CI related), and while such info was widely available in the Windows world, to the point that customised "distros" are available, it was nearly nonexistent for macOS; only the Hackintosh community had some useful articles on how things worked.

      Could the rise of LLMs and vibe-coding have motivated people who otherwise wouldn't bother?

      1. gumby · · focus · HN ↗
        It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.
        1. userbinator · · focus · HN ↗
          and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited

          That's a half-truth at best; I can just open the disk image in a hex editor if nothing else understands the format.

          Hackintoshers have figured out how to add/modify drivers etc. It's certainly not without obstacles, but that's still very far from "impossible". If I remember correctly, you need to re-snapshot the FS and tell the bootloader to boot from it.

          (And necessarily, ignoring the countless cries of "it can't be done" was how I was able to accomplish my goal... I knew that it was possible since I could edit any bit of the FS; figuring out which files I could remove and patch was the hard and undocumented part.)

          1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

            [deleted]

          2. odo1242 · · focus · HN ↗
            The entire system is signed and verified at boot. Any change to a macOS system outside of /Users, /Applications, and whatever else the OS lets you edit can't really be edited without disabling System Integrity Protection (which isn't recommended)
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