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macOS 15.4 Beta 'Hides' Amount of Storage Used by Apple Intelligence

Mr_Ed said:
Correct. But when you do turn it off, does Apple give any indication or assurance that relevant resources are released on your device and free for you to use?

This report makes Apple look like they are being less than forthright with customers. Shady.
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Good question. Until recently, if we turned off AI, the OS didn’t indicate that we now had more storage space available. But the AI package space (if we were being told the truth) was now seen by the OS as available to be overwritten if needed. I’d like confirmation that at least that is still the case. But, given this development, I suspect that it’s not.
 
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I mean why do users need to know how much storage space is taken up by this feature? Apple only provides premium machines with premium specs to match so you couldn’t possibly need to worry about storage issues, right?
 
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AppleFeller said:
I can’t understand if this is a security thing or not. Seems silly to hide it though.
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Maybe. Or Apple has realized that providing people with too much information isn't always a good idea. Just look at all the "Oh noes. My iPhone battery health is at 95% now. Why is it dropping so fast? What can I do to stop it from droppping so fast?" type posts on MR, Reddit, and other places.

Do we really want to see a bunch of "Oh noes. My Macs storage capacity has dropped to xx! What's happening?" type posts?
 
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I enabled Apple Intelligence on my Macbook Air to test it out 3 months ago (stupid me, right?) and turned it off the same day. It's still hanging on to 5.8gb. Thanks Apple.
 
People are going to conspiracy theory around, but my honest guest for why it was removed was because it was not accurate.
I mean, it was accurate in the way that it would tell you how much storage it was taking up, but you could sit there and watch it slowly tick up and down, especially after a software update, and that’s not particularly useful in the moment.
For example, after installing the latest 18.4 beta on my iPhone, the Apple Intelligence storage being used shot all the way up to 7 GB… before quickly falling back down to a much more reasonable 3-4 GB.
Not exactly useful information.
Still, the fact is that it is a beta and might very well just be a temporary bug
 
dannys1 said:
I mean that is a TINY LLM model - it's probably only 3 billion parameters. Well, I assume less as this also includes their image generation model too doesn't it?

We can't even really see how well their tiny LLM works as there's no way to interact with it and there's no way to test it - all it does at the moment that daft summary notifications.
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I know what you mean but on the other hand, 7GB for crappy image generation and summary notifications doesn’t seem small. That’s a terrible return on storage investment imo
 
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Lounge vibes 05 said:
People are going to conspiracy theory around, but my honest guest for why it was removed was because it was not accurate.
I mean, it was accurate in the way that it would tell you how much storage it was taking up, but you could sit there and watch it slowly tick up and down, especially after a software update, and that’s not particularly useful in the moment.
For example, after installing the latest 18.4 beta on my iPhone, the Apple Intelligence storage being used shot all the way up to 7 GB… before quickly falling back down to a much more reasonable 3-4 GB.
Not exactly useful information.
Still, the fact is that it is a beta and might very well just be a temporary bug
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I read a blog yesterday about how the get info window can grossly misrepresent what's free and what can be purged so this is probably partly to blame
Mind you this was in context of continuing APFS woes.
 
Where are all the people applauding the upgrade base storage and ram by Apple.

I have said it all along this is not a free upgrade. 16 GB is the new 8GB and 128GB is the new 64GB.

You think the extra cpu cores every year are free too? They will be used for AI-mining by Apple. They too will be removed from activity monitor and specsheets.
 
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I will gladly take a 20-50gb model if the AI becomes workable in a reliable manner. Especially to have this stuff on device. As of now I’m just ignoring Apple Intelligence because other then the summary notifications it has no day to day benefit for me. That said I’m also the person with minimal storage use on devices so I’m never “tight for space” to begin with. Those that are I’d highly recommend changing your habits or doubling up storage as you replace a iPhone or MacBook.
 
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mikebenton said:
If only there was a way to turn it off 🤔
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You missed the story where apple by secret turns it back on after a iOS update.
www.macrumors.com

Apple's Latest Updates Re-Enable Apple Intelligence on Some Devices

Some users are reporting that Apple's latest software updates are quietly re-enabling Apple Intelligence features, even after they had explicitly disabled them in the previous update. If you're catching up, Apple on Monday pushed out new macOS Sequoia 15.3.1 and iOS/iPadOS 18.3.1 point releases...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
 
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macfacts said:
You missed the story where apple by secret turns it back on after a iOS update.
www.macrumors.com

Apple's Latest Updates Re-Enable Apple Intelligence on Some Devices

Some users are reporting that Apple's latest software updates are quietly re-enabling Apple Intelligence features, even after they had explicitly disabled them in the previous update. If you're catching up, Apple on Monday pushed out new macOS Sequoia 15.3.1 and iOS/iPadOS 18.3.1 point releases...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
Click to expand...
That’s why, after every firmware update, we need to check that AI is still turned off - and turn it off if it is not.
 
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This Apple Intelligence thing turned into an annoyance to me. I used to set my macOS installation and all applications to English, so I gave in and tried Apple Intelligence. Wasn't even amused by it, so I turned it off... and found out this action spawns a really nasty bug that appears to eliminate the System Data block display in the Storage settings graph, and messes up with my internal hard drive's index, resulting in Finder calculating incorrectly HD available space, and available space was increasing, instead of decreasing.
I contacted Apple Support, and they know about it (at least that's what they told me.) Solution is to completely wipe out the Mac and reinstall macOS.
Guess what? After the latest macOS update, Apple Intelligence turned on by itself without asking for permission (another widespread and known bug) so I turned it off. Again that bug came up, so I had to wipe one more time my MacBook Air, and had to set the OS to Spanish since AI is only available in English. That's the only solution for me to avoid AI coming back again to mess up my System Data block and Finder. Effin' mini Skynet. Both times I filled up a support form describing the problem to Apple and taking screenshots as proof.
 
mikebenton said:
If only there was a way to turn it off 🤔
Click to expand...

Except it now is on by default after 15.3.1/18.3.1 - turning it off doesn't remove any of the components, it just disables them.

You're not gonna reclaim any lost space by simply turning it off.

EDIT: It also turns back on automatically when updating to today's .2 software update 😒
 
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