You should make use of Cunningham's Law[1]. Instead of posting an "Ask HN" asking if it's impossible to disable, post a "Show HN" claiming that it is impossible to disable.

Then people will flock to tell you how it can be disabled by XYZ.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Great advice. I should definitely heed this more often.

Just as a note, from what I see the problem is not only the privacy implications but also that the local AI comes with a baggage amounting to 10% of the space on the base mac models. Which is already severely limited.

I have not found the local/remote hand off to be very reliable either, so tasks that used to be almost instantaneous for Siri are now spinning to the point where I assume they failed. A simple 2 minute timer took almost 30 seconds to set the other day.

You're brave. I'm still on Sequoia.

I'm still on Mojave (10.14!) and it's just brilliant compared to the more modern MacOS. There's a Firefox fork called Momiji (https://github.com/aobaharuki2005/momiji-web-browser) which backports recent Firefox to very much older macOSes, and basically I still use 32 bit x86 applications sometimes.

My next laptop computer (which is sorely overdue) will be Linux with macOS in a VM.

A pity, because Keynote is great.

Same here. The new macOS'es always seem to add more restrictions, more bloat, etc nowadays. I was thinking of upgrading the other day; glad I didn't.

Oh look at that, there's a new update for Sequoia in settings!

It did take me a week to notice because the assholes keep spamming me about 26 or 27, but it's there.

> The new macOS'es always seem to add more restrictions, more bloat

The main reason I'm on Sequoia is the low contrast UI with the invisible resize points. The "intelligence" taking up space and probably having no off button is secondary.

  Oh look at that, there's a new update for Sequoia in settings!

Apple only guarantees to fix all known issues and security bugs in their latest OS versions.

  Note: Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, iOS 27, macOS 27, and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, iOS 26, macOS 26, and so on).

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/about-software-up...

The process that shows the Spotlight UI is now the one called "Siri", previously it was called "Spotlight".

Thanks, that's an interesting observation! When I double-clicked on the "Siri" process in Activity Monitor, I saw that it's an app called "Siri AI".

If the "Siri AI" app has replaced Spotlight, then I wonder if Apple keeps building "personal context" despite Siri and Apple Intelligence being disabled.

It for sure doesn't sound well to disable Siri and still see a "Siri" process.

This sounds similar to Microsoft and the start menu. A few years ago I went to extreme lengths to disable cortana (powershell guid uninstall). This invisibly and inexplicably disabled updates to the start menu search feature. The index remained the feature worked, it just never got updated again. No amount of manually reindexing the disk helped. Reinstalling cortana got it working.

That makes sense. Sending SIGKILL to that process causes the spotlight UI in the menu bar to flash.

I've been daily-driving a mac for 10 years now and I've only ever triggered Siri by accident. I do use it pretty regularly on the phone, mostly to set timers, get directions, and call contacts, but I've been well trained over these years to not expect it to be capable of more than that.

I remember it being pretty useful on phone. Now, it can't even "like" a song when I'm driving and I want it to add a song to my Spotify favourites list. It could do a few months ago, now it refuses with "sorry there was a problem with the app".

I've had to resort to asking it to take a screenshot so I can go find the song later. Three quarters of the time it never saves the screenshot though, despite seeing the screen flash out of the corner of my eye.

Gemini is similarly a step back. Google Assistant could hear me speak up and ask it to like or skip a song being played, driving or otherwise. It would quickly beep at me, pause the music/etc, accept input, process, then finish and resume the music (or skip to next track if asked).

Now it takes 10-15 seconds to start after a voice command, won't audibly alert or even stop music to take voice input, and usually fails to hear anything then quit out. Half the time it does that it then pauses the music and quits...

With Tidal Gemini can't do anything using voice commands. Maybe SOTA models can help those on the bleeding edge, but 95% of tech users just want it to work and be cheap enough. Apple figured this out a long time ago but can't help itself with being too clever.

> Gemini is similarly a step back. Google Assistant could hear me speak up and ask it to like or skip a song being played, driving or otherwise. It would quickly beep at me, pause the music/etc, accept input, process, then finish and resume the music (or skip to next track if asked).

Yeah I used the old Assistant regularly, but after the Gemini update it started refusing to set a timer for me, so I churned.

I've been using an iPhone 12 Mini since however long it's been out, never used Siri intentionally either, would prefer to disable it fully, but CarPlay for some reason cannot be used without Siri, even though I never use Siri. I consider it 1st party malware at this point.

It’s because they’d prefer you interacted with CarPlay with voice rather than looking away from the road.

An admirable objective, but given how “well” siri has worked in the past, an unrealistic one. We’ll see if 27 is a significant improvement. If I had to bet, I’d bet no, at least for the next year.

> It’s because they’d prefer you interacted with CarPlay with voice rather than looking away from the road.

So given I don't want to look at the phone nor speak with Siri, can I turn off interacting with the phone at all while it's connected? No, somehow, they do it the opposite way, and oh no, accidentally I need to also agree that Siri can listen all the time and also agree to...

Come on, it's very transparent what they're doing. Siri on or off doesn't make me or others look more or less on the phone. Forcing Siri on, forces us who don't use Siri and don't want to use Siri, to accidentally trigger Siri while we fucking drive, which is absolutely horrible.

Trivia: the most popular method of using Siri, per the analytics, is "accidental activation".

Your training is now out of date.

In Screen Time -> Content and Privacy, there's a setting to switch Siri to 'Siri Classic' which strips out the Apple Intelligence-backed behavior specifically.

Instead of "Siri Classic", I selected the "Don’t Allow Siri" option, but it didn't help. The "Siri" (Siri AI.app) process keeps running regardless.

Sounds like Apple hired some of the Microsoft project managers.

In my experience, every company with more than 1000 employees absolutely has garbage project managers!

There's a secret government program that distributes them. After reaching some amount of employees, a company must include one per X employees.

It's a joke. Microsoft has been ignoring user preferences and doing what is good for Microsoft for many years now, and the parent poster was implying that Apple is now doing the same kind of bad behavior.

I think the people who aren't greeted by this dichotomy when turning their PC aren't catching the reference.

At the risk of explaining a joke: Windows tries to get you to set up things like OneDrive on startup with a "do it now" or "remind me later", there's no "never ask me about this again".

There’s the old trick of setting your computer language to be different from the Siri language. I get the following error message when I open Siri in Settings:

> Apple Intelligence requires that Mac and Siri are set to the same language. Currently your Mac is set to English (United States) and Siri is set to English (Canada).

I think at one point they may have removed this limitation but then they reintroduced it in macOS 27.0.

Yes, I did something similar: prior to disabling Siri, I set Siri's language to French and kept the system language set to English (UK), but the Siri AI.app ("Siri" process in Activity Monitor) just keeps running despite Siri being indicated as disabled in Settings.

If you are on macOS 27, could you please open Activity Monitor, search (filter) for "siri" and see if a process called "Siri" is still running?

You are right. The UI shows Siri disabled and offers to turn it on, but the process is still running. That process seems to change its name based on whether the UI thinks Siri is enabled; it can be called either just "Siri" or "Siri AI" but it’s the same executable.

FWIW it's entirely possible (and not uncommon) for a single executable to behave differently depending on the name it was launched under.

I have no idea in this case, but it's possible that "Siri" and "Siri AI" are genuinely different in behaviours and interfaces and dependencies, even if they are the same binary.

This is a reddit thread where OP claims to have gotten instructions from Apple Support to remove Apple Intelligence.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1wlm6gd/apple_support_...

Does not work on 27. Everything gets downloaded again.

I like how Apple designed an optional feature that requires you to disable SIP to reclaim storage space.

If you don't manually delete the files, they remain on your Mac until your storage is nearly full.

The absolute arrogance of taking up this much disk space for an application that most serious users will simply never engage with. Garbage.

Yeah but siri/apple AI has 100% adoption rate on apple devices ;)

One workaround that I know would work would be an enterprise profile. I know this because I’m one of the people tasked with blocking AI stuff at my org. How you’d implement this without a subscription to management (MDM) software I leave to you to research. I know it’s possible without proprietary tools because I’ve read about people using profiles to block software updates on their personal computers, but I don’t recall how that’s done.

You can just use Apple Configurator to make a .mobileconfig file and apply that, no MDM required.

The final release of 27 still has so many bugs.

It's depressing to see certain bugs persist in each new beta. You know they'll be in release.

I gave up reporting anything years ago.

I really can't believe how bad it's gotten. I know people on here have been complaining about the direction of macOS for years but in the last few years it increasingly feels like I'm being punished for using my computer.

A bicycle for your mind with squeaking brakes and a skipping chain.

I jumped to mac with Tiger when they started using x86. Around 2006 I believe. It was always to become more comfortable with POSIX, but I liked it and have stayed. My current laptop is a 2019 MBP and as they are now phasing out Intel support I'm now buying a thinkpad and finally moving on to Linux. Macos has just become too annoying, and macs too expensive.

Try Omarchy, you might enjoy it and to my knowledge everything should work out of the box.

:) I'm not trying omarchy. I'll probably go with Fedora or NixOS.

It's not a bicycle for your mind, it's a railbike draisine that only goes on the rails that Apple allows you to use.

I know that you're joking and that I'm late to reply but honestly thinking about the care and planning that has to go into laying railroad tracks and the efficiency of adhesion traction, I would kill for computer that came close to what I imagine using a railbike feels like (a long time dream of mine). Imagine if someone put that much thought into Finder (or Apple Music).

I'm only allowed either Windows or Mac at work so I'll just get less and less efficient until I'm replaced by an LLM.

I've love to disable Apple Intelligence just to get the space back. It's murdering my Mac Mini.

Resistance is futile.

you will be assimilated

Sequoia will be taken from my cold dead hands.

Same here. Unfortunately, if you use Xcode to develop for iOS, then Apple basically forces you to install macOS 27 to be able to develop for the new iPhones. The iPhone 18 Pro requires Xcode 27, and Xcode 27 won't run on Sequoia.

If anyone knows how to make the iPhone 18 Pro work with Xcode 26 on Sequoia, and in turn with iOS 27, I (and I'm sure many other people) would be very happy to hear how!

This is how Apple have forced Mac upgrades for the last 20 years, there is no way round it other than to comply and buy yourself a new Mac.

Does Xcode 26 still work on Sequoia? They usually stop supporting N-1 around March.

It does. The latest officially supported Xcode version runnable on Sequoia is 26.3. See https://developer.apple.com/xcode/system-requirements/

But it is possible to run even the latest Xcode 26.6 by directly executing Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode, and Xcode will run. This trick doesn't work with Xcode 27 anymore though. If you try that, you'll see a warning message that says something like "Xcode requires macOS 26 to run".

> Sequoia will be taken from my cold dead hands.

I'm still running Leopard. The built in X11 server, combined with X11 forwarding, and a Linux box works fine for my meager needs. I can run Chromium using X11 forwarding, seems to work fine for the most part.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535

Try disabling any of the launchd tasks related to it, odds are theres a service that starts at boot/login regardless of any user-facing setting that do nothing if they're all turned off (just like iCloud related daemons).

Odds are you'll probably run into something that requires you to disable SIP, like I did when I got tired of mediaanalysisd eating up CPU cycles on a 2018 Mac mini.

Thanks, I believe this is what the debloat script mentioned in my post does. I manually executed the `launchctl bootout` and `launchctl disable` commands on all Siri and AI-related services in the https://github.com/OleksandrKrupko/mac-os-debloat/blob/main/... script, but the "Siri" process ("Siri AI.app") still keeps running even after restarting.

The Siri AI.app is read-only, so I could not even remove it. But perhaps it would be possible to boot into Recovery, mount the system partition as rw and delete the Siri AI.app from the filesystem?

P.S. I did also disable mediaanalysisd and photoanalysisd, and those are NOT running. However, the Siri AI.app does keep running...

Couldn’t it be due to spotlight being entirely replaced by this new Siri AI? Not sure how things work under the hood now.

I didn't check it yet but I hope being in EU macOS 27 upgrade is basically small UI tweaks and thats it :D

Still holding off for now

You can move over to Microsoft and use Copilot or if that isn’t enough, you can buy a new Googlebook laptop.

Goobledygook laptops would be as much of an abomination as those Windows S laptops

They might as well merge and become Chromicrapple.

Personally, I think Apple should have gotten rid of Siri a long time ago. It's a pretty useless assistant. They'd be better off integrating Gemini or ChatGPT instead.

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

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535

> I could still see a "Siri" process running in Activity Monitor. Upon further inspection, I found that it is the "Siri AI.app".

Is it doing anything (what are its CPU and memory usage like)?

Garbage like this is why I'm never going back to a proprietary OS. I remember being unable to kill Cortana on Windows (it would automatically restart itself) being the last straw.

I still have to find anybody using Siri on his Mac

Please tell me what the use case is. Somebody somewhere must find it useful otherwise it would not be so prominent.

This a genuine question btw not trying to be sarcastic or dismissive

Not sure. People are saying "Siri" but complaining about space utilization which I assume is for the foundational models. Those are used pervasively, and are exposed as a resource for third party app usage as well.

Apple's goal was to have a set of foundational models to discourage proliferation of small bundled models in first and third party software. So ironically, they exist to try to save people disk space.

My guess is that iOS, iPadOS and macOS are converging on some points, and Siri gets included.

It would be interesting on macOS if it had amazing computer use and was able to control all aspects of all apps, and you’d be able to instantly do anything with voice only.

Siri Actions are one tiny step closer to that, but we’re pretty far away from this.

Silly argument. It’s more like buying a BWM and being happy with everything expect a stupid decision like placement of the handbrake. Of course you can complain about it.

I think the counter-argument would be that one obviously should have gotten a Kia K4. Otherwise equivalent for everyone's needs excluding hand brake location.

Not a car person but pretty sure they are a KIA and a BWM isn’t identical cars.

Plenty of other operating systems out there? Yeah. Better? Depends. Hardware as a package? Absolutely not and it’s by such a wide margin there’s no competition whatsoever.

I don’t particularly care for MacOS but Apple’s hardware is generally best in class, particularly for battery life, touchpad, and other laptop specifics.

Huawei has been shipping decent MBA-like laptops for some years now. The latest Panther Lake laptops seem to have made some leaps towards Apple on the hardware side as well. I still won't expect any Windows laptop in these form factors to outlive most MacBooks though.

I started de-googling a long time ago, part of it was an iPhone (12 mini), 5 years later I really felt like de-Appling as well. The Appstore is a cesspool, privacy concerns are about the same as Google now (or perhaps always were?).

I went with GrapheneOS. Very good experience, but not without Google Play (store and services). It's all sandboxed, so presumably I'm only leaking consciously chosen data. It's really aimed at security, not so much de-googling. Something like Murena's /e/OS is much more aimed at de-Googling, but as GrapheneOS devs will usually be quick to point out here, they are "quite poor" with their security.

A de-Googled functional appstore on a FairPhone (+ with all the GrapheneOS required security bells and wistles) would be ideal for me. But it's still either optimal security focussed OR de-Googling/de-big-teching focused. Yes there is f-droid, but there are too many apps that require the Google services (like banking).

Atm 1 app does not work, one of my banking apps required the highest tier of Google control. I will happily install on devices that have been years without security updates though :s

Overall the GrapheneOS experience (base launcher etc) is very clean, fast, minimal, ad free.