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

598 points · 411 comments · privacyisntdead

  1. _pdp_ · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. zanderwohl · · focus · HN ↗
      Because the Macbook Air still comes with only 512 GB of SSD in its default config. A feature that you rarely use probably isn't worth even 1/50th of your meager storage.
      1. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
        The neo comes with 256gb, which would be fine if they used it sparingly, I don't have any issue with this much storage on my phone, but on macos the space just gets eaten up by junk and is hard to manage.
        1. zanderwohl · · focus · HN ↗
          I love the Neo for what it does at its price point, but on the other hand it's absolute robbery to have a 256 gb SSD and an 8 gb or 12 gb or whatever RAM. MacOS totally uses less RAM than Windows, but man. It's still not enough in this day and age.
          1. mschuster91 · · focus · HN ↗
            macOS doesn't necessarily use less RAM than Windows (if Windows is properly debloated), but since the storage is highly integrated with and in close proximity to the SoC it is much faster (both in terms of bandwidth and physical latency) than most Windows laptops.

            Basically, with storage directly attached to the SoC you can use the SSD as a decent-enough swap without the user noticing it too much, but if every access has to go through the platform chipset and then physically travel many centimeters until it arrives at the disk, being bandwidth-restricted by physics (aka, link training)? Whoops.

            And on top of that, your typical Windows SSD has its own controller doing translation from SATA/NVMe to the flash layer (including wear level management etc), but IIRC with Apple M devices, this functionality is integrated into the SoC.

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