Has the AI (Apple Intelligence) been useful in Silicon Macs, or just a hype?

[chmania]

I didn’t buy the first M1 Mac but waited for the M4 Mac instead. However, the much-hyped Apple Intelligence is practically useless to me. Siri is dreadful and doesn’t provide any coherent answers. Siri and Apple Intelligence seem to be linked; if Siri is disabled, Apple Intelligence is automatically turned off as well. The writing tools are generally pointless and only necessary if you use Safari. But if you use any other web browser, all those “Writing Tools” are available in the sidebar. Prioritising notifications is pointless, as it’s not for a bot to decide. Live translation? Fine, that might be useful on a phone, but on a Mac? Not so much.

 

[radow]

I only use Xcode code completion model and that's not even part of the Apple Intelligence brand. While Apple Intelligence is not that useful, you can try apps like LM Studio and Ollama to leverage offline LLM models.

 

[nmt1900]

I turned Apple Intelligence on once. After turning it back off it cheated system to believe it has 100 GB more free storage space available than it actually had i.e. purgeable space data got screwed up. It went back to normal when Apple Intelligence was on and went back to being wrong again after turning it off.

I ended up repartitioning, reinstalling and restoring Time Machine backup to correct the problem. While allegedly uncommon I have found at least some people with similar problem and same remediation to it as only solution. After that I set Siri language to different than system language so Apple Intelligence could not be turned on any more even by mistake.

Knowing how badly all development behind Apple Intelligence has been I would not even consider turning it back on - at least as long as BETA is staying on that icon. These are my 2 cents on this.

P. S. This was on Sequoia - so maybe Sequoia was partially almost as "utter garbage" as Tahoe is

 

[TumbleDryer]

I turned Apple Intelligence on once. After turning it back off it cheated system to believe it has 100 GB more free storage space available than it actually had i.e. purgeable space data got screwed up. It went back to normal when Apple Intelligence was on and went back to being wrong again after turning it off.

I ended up repartitioning, reinstalling and restoring Time Machine backup to correct the problem. While allegedly uncommon I have found at least some people with similar problem and same remediation to it as only solution. After that I set Siri language to different than system language so Apple Intelligence could not be turned on any more even by mistake.

Knowing how badly all development behind Apple Intelligence has been I would not even consider turning it back on - at least as long as BETA is staying on that icon. These are my 2 cents on this.

P. S. This was on Sequoia - so maybe Sequoia was partially almost as "utter garbage" as Tahoe is

I had the exact same experience. Turn it on, create one image in Playground and turned it off.

 

[thebart]

I use Claude, open AI, Gemini for various purposes, mostly coding

I also run kokoro TTS locally. Wish I had more than 16gb to run LLMs locally

Never turned on AI because I don't want it to download a bunch of stuff then never delete it or something. I made the mistake of downloading some Apple TTS voices and now have no idea how to delete them. Every trick I found by googling didn't work. I can't even find where they are on disk

 

[nmt1900]

Now we know that Apple is failing in it so badly they had to resort to custom Gemini model (running in Apple's own datacenters) and paying Google for that.
However Apple is still "net-profiting" on the relationship as Google pays Apple way more for promoting Google search engine on iOS devices...