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 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.
Yeah, I’ll wait to update my computers until Apple gives us an actual choice.
drooopy 42 minutes ago [-]
I still don't see a good reason to upgrade from Sequoia.
plutokras 50 seconds ago [-]
I was skipping Tahoe too after seeing all those posts about the differently rounded corners.
This time I took the plunge and upgraded, and I have to admit the whole system, especially Safari is much more snappy than before.
kristofferR 2 hours ago [-]
macOS 27 is way faster and more stable than macOS 26 though, so unless you are on an ancient version it doesn't make sense to not upgrade.
jtbayly 25 minutes ago [-]
On one of my machines, I don’t know if I could even make it fit. So it’s a no-brainer to not update on that one, if they are going to force an extra 14GB download on me.
seam_carver 2 hours ago [-]
macOS 15 still gets security updates.
CodingJeebus 2 hours ago [-]
I've hit some really weird window/workspace UI bugs so far in MacOS27. It's not no-brainer update yet, IMO.
wahnfrieden 2 hours ago [-]
Time to permanently offboard from Apple ecosystem then
jtbayly 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps eventually. I know I’m in a “closed ecosystem,” and that removes a fair bit of choice in a variety of places. But Apple is known to walk bad decisions back at times. This update is an example, with liquid glass. Another recent one was the iCloud private email planned domain change being scrapped.
bee_rider 29 minutes ago [-]
I mean they added a slider to make Liquid Glass slightly less bad, but the “good” end is just the old “reduce transparency” option. They’ve got a lot of progress to make, if they are ever going to give us back the pre-liquid-glass UI density.
wahnfrieden 60 minutes ago [-]
Liquid Glass was rushed out because their flagship WWDC feature, Apple Intelligence, wasn’t ready as expected. They knew they didn’t finish refining Glass as they had intended to. They had unfinished work with Glass that got pushed to this year due to the last minute change in direction. The refinements we got weren’t only the product of feedback and they already intended to revisit the design.
This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.
If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.
sleepybrett 2 hours ago [-]
why is a local model any different than any other file they want to install with their os?
hbn 2 hours ago [-]
Well because it could be an extra ~20GB which is not nothing if you have a 256GB disk.
njovin 1 hours ago [-]
It's 14GB of something I don't want, need, nor have any use for, on a machine that is notorious for making storage upgrades difficult.
soapdog 1 hours ago [-]
because some people don't want AI and would rather even the files were not present in their computer.
worldsavior 2 hours ago [-]
Though what about security fixes?
ebtebt 2 hours ago [-]
How much storage does this save?
fuu_dev 2 hours ago [-]
Apple intelligence is listed as 29 GB in the Storage settings. Which should be the amount of space you get back.
MacOS 27 is also diffrent in that it does still downloads the data for EU users and removes or hides options in menues to dissable functionality. This means users lose the said space when upgrading to 27.
fundatus 2 hours ago [-]
Apple Intelligence is available on macOS in the EU. It's only disabled on iOS/iPadOS.
They need an option to completely disable and delete Apple Intelligence.
A 256GB Mac Mini is effectively unable to use macOS 27 due to this bloated nonsense.
viccis 19 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I use my 256gb Mac Mini for iOS dev, which has always had enough space for an iPad and iPhone simulator with plenty to spare, but this eats way into that.
thewhitetulip 3 hours ago [-]
I am tired to fight against every platform that I have to use
De macify Mac
Degoogle Android
Demacify ipad
DeLLM chrome browsers local llm
Can we expect sane decisions from corpos about what we want rather than what latest thing they want to push on us?
agoodusername63 2 hours ago [-]
no. buy a linux compatible laptop and deal with the UX downgrade.
drooopy 41 minutes ago [-]
What downgrade? A typical Gnome desktop is far more coherent than Windows or even macOS in some regards these days.
jhack 3 hours ago [-]
Apple says their users make 2.5B Siri requests per day. Sounds like people want it?
tiborsaas 3 hours ago [-]
Do they have a breakdown for platforms? iOS vs. macOS, I'd bet most of it is iOS.
I don't have Siri enabled, I've never felt the need for it on desktop.
nozzlegear 43 minutes ago [-]
I use it on the desktop.
moribvndvs 3 hours ago [-]
Even though I do use it, a choice would be nice.
drooopy 39 minutes ago [-]
Never met anyone who used siri out in public, to be honest.
Hodgewocket 3 hours ago [-]
Are they aware?
javier2 2 hours ago [-]
I dont even have Siri enabled, but even less so on macOS.
a1o 2 hours ago [-]
If you have a car you are forced to because you can’t use Apple Car Play if you don’t enable Siri.
I also don’t use but I have to have it enabled to be able to use Google Maps, and Siri occasionally mistakes a conversation for being invited to listen and speak.
thewhitetulip 3 hours ago [-]
How many apple devices exist globally?
Does everyone use siri? How about keeping it opt-in?
pesus 2 hours ago [-]
I get forced to use it While using CarPlay. I don't particularly want it, though, considering it still regularly fails at basic tasks like adding the currently playing song to a playlist.
GuinansEyebrows 3 hours ago [-]
i wonder how many of them are like 100% of my requests?
- "set a timer for 14 minutes"
- "remind me to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow at noon"
- "turn off the bedroom lights"
that don't require any form of AI and have functioned perfectly well (aside from having a hard time when i mumble) for years on non-AI versions of Siri?
thewebguyd 3 hours ago [-]
I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.
anamexis 2 hours ago [-]
I think you're going to need some kind of ML to turn that question into a structured search, and interpret the results.
regenschutz 2 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily. NLP is possible to do without any ML. See ELIZA [0] as an example, which used pattern matching and substitution to process natural language. A few simple rules can cover a majority of requests. It's still AI, but not ML.
Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.
This matches my use cases. Poor speech to text recognition so I don't trust siri to do anything non-trivial
dreamcompiler 58 minutes ago [-]
Siri was always AI, but the popular connotation of "AI" changes all the time. It now means "LLMs built with transformers."
mathisfun123 2 hours ago [-]
> 2.5B Siri requests per day
that's like one request per day per user lolol
vitalrune 1 hours ago [-]
The issue it's they make it very hard to remove it to clear the space used by it, i think you got to boot into recovery mode and do some risky crap, my macbook is almost out of space just from development cache..
ezst 3 hours ago [-]
KDE. KDE is all you need.
Ginger-Pickles 2 hours ago [-]
One arguably don’t even need KDE any more; the coding models will throw together a perfectly adequate desktop environment.
regenschutz 2 hours ago [-]
Why should one use something adequate when something amazing exists?
ezst 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure what the point of this would be? Devalued street creds for running something nobody else does? Who cares?
basisword 3 hours ago [-]
You don't need to. Use the alternatives.
kotaKat 2 hours ago [-]
without a reddit account:
... can you also force Siri off by using Screen Time controls? I noticed that in the Screen Time menus, "Content and Privacy" restrictions can be toggled on. From there seems to be an additional "Siri" menu that lets me change the allowed Siri version from Siri Classic to Siri AI as well as options to turn off the global writing tools/assistance (which turns off the annoying Siri bubble on every textbox now).
I suspect forcing Siri off via those controls would work easier than using Low Data Mode or trying to force Siri to disable via language selection.
Rendered at 18:32:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
"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:
https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri
* 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.
Not a bad list from Apple.
This time I took the plunge and upgraded, and I have to admit the whole system, especially Safari is much more snappy than before.
This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.
If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.
MacOS 27 is also diffrent in that it does still downloads the data for EU users and removes or hides options in menues to dissable functionality. This means users lose the said space when upgrading to 27.
The "Always verify important details. Siri is an Al that may make mistakes." is the new version of "your mileage may vary".
Also, I get a similar message when using Gemini, OpenAI and Claude.
I own a "Standard iPhone" and an M1 Mac; these numbers track.
Not all of the space used by Apple Intelligence is downloaded model size, which explains the reasonable difference.
A 256GB Mac Mini is effectively unable to use macOS 27 due to this bloated nonsense.
De macify Mac Degoogle Android Demacify ipad DeLLM chrome browsers local llm
Can we expect sane decisions from corpos about what we want rather than what latest thing they want to push on us?
I don't have Siri enabled, I've never felt the need for it on desktop.
I also don’t use but I have to have it enabled to be able to use Google Maps, and Siri occasionally mistakes a conversation for being invited to listen and speak.
Does everyone use siri? How about keeping it opt-in?
- "set a timer for 14 minutes"
- "remind me to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow at noon"
- "turn off the bedroom lights"
that don't require any form of AI and have functioned perfectly well (aside from having a hard time when i mumble) for years on non-AI versions of Siri?
Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
that's like one request per day per user lolol
... can you also force Siri off by using Screen Time controls? I noticed that in the Screen Time menus, "Content and Privacy" restrictions can be toggled on. From there seems to be an additional "Siri" menu that lets me change the allowed Siri version from Siri Classic to Siri AI as well as options to turn off the global writing tools/assistance (which turns off the annoying Siri bubble on every textbox now).
I suspect forcing Siri off via those controls would work easier than using Low Data Mode or trying to force Siri to disable via language selection.