Apple Intelligence to Be Enabled on All Compatible Devices
Apple has now released macOS 15.3 Sequoia, iOS 18.3, and iPadOS 18.3 with bug fixes and security updates, but the primary focus remains Apple Intelligence, with various tweaks and improvements. Although Apple is maintaining its “beta” label, these releases automatically enable Apple Intelligence by default for all devices that support it: any Mac with Apple silicon, iPhone 15 Pro or later, iPad Pro or iPad Air with M-series chips, or the 7th-generation iPad mini with the A17 Pro.
Apple’s developer release notes say:
For users new or upgrading to macOS 15.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during Mac onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.
This decision has triggered widespread commentary on Daring Fireball, Macworld, Pixel Envy, and others. I find Apple’s move unsurprising because Apple Intelligence isn’t a discrete thing; it’s a large and disparate collection of features, including:
- Photos: Clean Up, natural language searching, and improved Memory movie creation
- Text and Writing: Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration for any app
- Communication: Priority messages in Mail, Smart Reply and summaries in both Mail and Messages
- Notes and Phone: Audio transcription summaries
- Creative Tools: Genmoji and Image Playground for image generation, Image Wand for Apple Pencil sketches
- Focus: Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing and Reduce Interruptions Focus
- Notifications: Summaries for busy apps and conversations
- Siri: Enhanced capabilities but primarily ChatGPT integration
- Camera: Visual Intelligence lookups (iPhone 16 only)
That’s a lot. Beyond the fact that Apple Intelligence is the major marketing thrust for this batch of operating systems, it makes no sense for Apple to offer so many features only to people who realize they must manually enable Apple Intelligence. Had Apple released all these features independently rather than bundling them under the Apple Intelligence rubric, no one would have said anything about wanting to control them all together.
Don’t take that to mean that these features are fully baked or even good. Apart from a few standouts, they’re forgettable. Clean Up is welcome for those who use Photos instead of Lightroom, and Writing Tools may be helpful for those who would never subscribe to Grammarly. I’m sure others have their favorites—some Apple Pencil users may love Image Wand, for instance—but it’s easy to ignore most of the rest. The less said of Siri at this point, the better.
The storage requirements are substantial. Apple says Apple Intelligence needs 7 GB of free space during installation, which may be leaving some headroom for expansion. Apple Intelligence consumes 5.78 GB on my iPhone 16 Pro and 5.5 GB on my M1 MacBook Air. (Look in Settings/System Settings > General > iPhone Storage/Storage > iOS/macOS.) Turning off Apple Intelligence did not release that space, though iOS might have reclaimed it had I been low. Storing and running Apple Intelligence’s models on our devices is the price we pay for privacy.
The “beta” label is another issue. Traditionally, beta releases are feature-complete and have no known serious bugs. Apple Intelligence as a whole—if it were a thing—isn’t yet feature-complete, and while we don’t know if Apple knows that it has serious bugs, the blatantly wrong news summaries and incorrect identification of spouses would seem to qualify. But bemoaning abuses of the “beta” label is nothing new—Geoff Duncan wrote about it 29 years ago in “Waiting with Beta’d Breath” (13 May 1996). I was amused to discover Geoff’s article linked in support of “perpetual beta” in Wikipedia.
Ultimately, I’m neither surprised nor all that perturbed by Apple turning on Apple Intelligence for everyone. It was bound to happen eventually. I remain curious as to how long Apple will attempt to explain away Apple Intelligence’s failings by the fact that it’s in “beta.” It’s difficult to justify such a tag for features that are standard across hundreds of millions of devices. Future problems can’t be laid at the feet of a pretend “beta”—they’re just bugs.
Should you turn off Apple Intelligence after Apple turns it on for you? If you’re confident that you’ll never want to use Clean Up, Writing Tools, or any other features, there’s no real harm in deactivating it in Settings/System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri. However, I don’t see much point in doing so. Like so many other features Apple adds to its apps and operating systems, most Apple Intelligence features won’t get in your way, and those that might—like notification summaries—can be turned off independently.
OK, so what’s the minimum I have to do to disable on-by-default Apple Intelligence features?
I’ll be applying this knowledge to help my mother, who isn’t literate enough in English to do this herself, and I most certainly don’t want any AI features making her experience worse; they should only be activated when she chooses to use them, which is certainly something I’m open to teaching her how to do. Particularly if they help her write better English or touch up her photos. But I’m suspicious of notification summaries or custom focuses or email summaries. Is that everything?
On all devices where Apple Intelligence can be enabled, go to System Settings>Apple Intelligence & Siri and toggle Apple Intelligence (the top switch) off.
That would definitely turn off AI, but how about limiting surprises caused by AI, without disabling it entirely?
Example: disable categorisation from the Mail app because that just makes it harder to see all your new email in one place. I already did this because mum doesn’t get much email, by her own preference.
I just turned off Microsoft’s AI in Word because it explicitly allows them to scrape documents prepared in Word, and I would give Apple Intelligence the same treatment if they acted the same way. It may be simpler to stay with Intel Macs.
While the immediate concern with AI is intellectual property, another very important issue is performance. I have turned off autocorrect everywhere I can find it because I suffered a disaster in preparing an edition of one my books. The autocorrect changed standard abbreviations of scientific units without asking me, so the abbreviation became either initial caps or all lower case. Kilohertz became khz instead of kHz, gigahertz became Ghz instead of GHz, and so on. As a professional writer, I wanted the final say.
My experience with AI so far is that it is only useful if you check it for accuracy. I can do that with Otter.ai, and it’s a big help in transcribing, if I listen carefully, but I caught it rounding the numbers in one interview. I want to trust the software I use to be accurate, not hallucinating or cutting corners. I don’t know exactly what Siteground did when they wrote their own spam filter, but whatever it was racked up huge numbers of false positives that messed up my dealing with clients. If tech companies are going to use AI, they should be liable for the consequences of its mistakes.
I was alarmed at the use of 7GB of space for a feature I neither want nor need. Do we know for certain that installing this update will use up all this space? I don’t have enough disk space as it is, thanks to the premium Apple charges for storage.
There are many problems with Apple Intelligence, but privacy is not one of them. The entire complaint about storage space is because so much is happening on-device. And things that require more processing (which aren’t the Writing Tools for the most part, as I understand it) would go to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.
Sure, but that’s true of everything where you care about accuracy. Build a spreadsheet, and you have to verify that your formulas are correct. Ask someone to complete a task, and you have to check that they did it the way you asked. And, of course, because humans are so inaccurate in so many ways, we don’t care about accuracy in many cases, as indicated by the number of spelling and grammar mistakes in everything that’s written online.
I don’t know, since all my devices had it turned on so all I could test was turning it off. If someone had a sacrificial device that could be set up from scratch without restoring any backup, that might provide some information. (I’m not sure what Apple Intelligence would do in a virtual machine in Sequoia.)
I find it very difficult to orally ask questions in a way that an app like Siri designed to understand “speech” can understand. I am not sure why, but it may be that I often stop and redirect my questions in mid-sentence.
On my M1 Air using Sequoia, under Storage it stays that 5.5GB is being used. However, I can tell you that it downloaded more than that as I was wondering where my data was going when I was using a hotspot. I turned off my wifi so it would stop but I could not turn off Apple Intelligence as it kept stating that it was “downloading” even if you have no data connection.
The real problem here is I never turned on Apple Inteliigence so how it started to download is a mystery to me. I decided to see if it would finish today and after downloading around 11GB of data, it said it was ready. This is after it already downloaded that much about a week ago. I’m not happy with Apple after this issue as the Air only has so much space on the SSD and using hotspot data which is limited is a problem when you don’t want to go over that limit. I don’t use Siri either.
Sadly, even by those of us that care about it. Although I read my posts here before clicking the “Reply” button, I frequently find typos when I re-read it later and have to go back and make edits. (Most of the time, if one of my messages has a change history, it’s because of this, although I sometimes actually add/change content.)
And for that one article I wrote for TidBITS, @ace and I went through more rounds of editing than I care to think about, simply because every time you read/proofread something, you find something else you realize could be a bit better.
I’ve used AI resources at work (ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Adobe) because I didn’t have to pay for prompts and Microsoft’s had set privacy with my work so nothing get’s cloud access.
However, with Apple, I think I should be about to opt-In not out and not after its installed. Already, iOS and Mac news blogs are warning that Apple’s intelligence with 18.3 will consume alot of battery.
I also don’t approve that my System Setting has red dot telling me I have an Update, when its about Apple Intelligence agreement.
What has me aggravated at work is that now, my faculty want tools to check the students tools, and how their colleagues use AI. Well? Reach out to our learning center support and figure it out. AI, I think, should replace teachers, admins, directors, and those that don’t leave a desk. Building and maintenance can use AI but it won’t ever replace them. IT can’t be replaced but only assisted. Service Desk…can be replaced. Making money off tokens for prompts…people will get addicted and THAT is why all these companies are tripping over themselves… AI is the OxyCotin and FANG are the dealers.
I remember being surprised (and confused) when Apple Intelligence had to be enabled at first release. The justification at the time was that it was beta and Apple didn’t want to slam all their new “private compute” servers with too much traffic.
Enabling it by default now seems like the natural next step. No doubt more servers are online and Apple has had a chance to see the traffic and estimate the future load and is ready for everyone that can, to use it. I’m not sure it’s really that big of a deal, especially since it can be turned off.
As to the “beta” status, Apple can’t win. When Apple Maps debuted with major bugs – bad enough to get Scott Forstall fired – one of the common criticisms was that Apple should have given it a “beta” label so that they had an excuse for the bugs. Now Apple has done that with Apple Intelligence and the media is critical of Apple for releasing unfinished software!
(What is more concerning to me is if the beta label stays on for too long. Like a year from now if it’s still “beta,” that’s a problem.)
Gmail was in beta for five years.
Nothing would stop Apple from including an at-installation opt-in for their AI, at least for the first few iterations; it would show respect for their users.
For example: “Apple Intelligence is a collection of new features which we think all users will like and will in future be a part of our OSes, at the Beta stage we’d like to offer the following options: ‘Yes, go for it’/‘No thanks’/‘Maybe, let me learn more and choose’”.
Clear, concise, putting users on notice, not overwhelming with options.
Oh, and a choice for those trying it out or who mistakenly installed it, maybe in the Settings, to choose ‘I changed my mind, clear usage/history/storage of Apple Intelligence’ so users could get their 7GB back and remove any analysis locally and elsewhere.
It’s a definite skill. I’ve figured out how to do that fairly well (I need to write about voice searching soon), but I still have trouble dictating text. I remember hearing from a lawyer many years ago that learning to give dictation was quite difficult.
Same here! TidBITS articles take a long time because it’s so hard to get to a professional level of accuracy and writing. But it’s totally fine in less formal contexts to pull back on that since almost no one has the time to make sure everything they say is both right and well-written.
Another article I need to write is about Grammarly, which has a feature that makes it easy to improve written text. It’s far beyond what Writing Tools can do, both in terms of function and interface.
I never have been able to dictate text, and I can’t give technical presentations without something like PowerPoint to tell me what I should say next.
Proofreading something you wrote can be difficult because your mind may remember what you meant to say, but your fingers may have fumbled along the way.
Although Mr Engst doesn’t see much point in deactivating A-AI, to me it’s mostly a matter of self-respect (same with Siri). But I would also have a resource concern. If the 6 GB of space for it is because of “privacy”, then presumably instead of sending tasks to a data center to burn up electricity there, it would have to thrash your own CPU. It’s no doubt optimized for the M chip, but still, do you really need to use that extra energy, which is a rather precious resource? Or would it be doing both? Less is more, I say. And keep computers “dumb” (ie, passive tools).
I’m very confident I don’t want, much less need, any of that. As a professional creative, I see no point in sacrificing the originality and quality of my work at the altar of features that are little more than the latest tech fad and a ploy to keep Wall Street analysts placated in the absence of real hardware innovation.
I upgraded to iPhone 16 mostly because my previous XS was getting long in the tooth. I remain deeply underwhelmed and somewhat resentful of 16’s mediocrity.
This coming from someone who has used a Mac since 1984. I bought iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods on each respective release day. But the last few years, I find myself at an Apple Store only to replace an outdated device.
For the most part, I haven’t seen my use of Apple Intelligence (which is pretty minimal) having any noticeable impact on battery life on my iPhone. The one exception was Clean Up—I remember noticing that when I was testing it heavily, it did seem to draw down the battery more quickly than normal.
So if you’re not planning to use Apple Intelligence significantly, I think worrying about power consumption is unwarranted. And even if you are using it heavily and having to charge a bit more frequently, the power usage of an iPhone or MacBook is so minimal in the scheme of things that I can’t see any reason to worry about it. Many everyday activities (driving, flying, etc) will have vastly more energy impact than charging your devices a but more often. The main issue with the 5.8 GB of used storage space is that it’s not available for other uses, so if you run close to the edge, that might be problematic.
…just do what I do every year: buy the largest model of Pro iPhone, loads of free space. Tada!
/s
Why? It’s just more intrusive overhead (not to mention space taken up) for something I definitely don’t need and probably don’t want. I feel like we’re suddenly embracing Clippy, still widely regarded as one of the worst experiences in technology ever.
As I said in the article, it’s because Apple Intelligence isn’t one thing. It’s a host of largely unrelated features. For most people, it’s not worth trying to predict if you will or won’t ever appreciate having them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple removed the switch in some future version of the operating system to match the lack of a switch for all the Continuity features, most of which many people probably don’t use or think they want either.
If Continuity hogged 7GB of precious disk space and randomly told us public figures had just died even though they were alive and well, you can be sure we’d hear from a lot more people looking for a master switch to kill it.
I turn it off, and every subsequent update turns it back on again. Sigh.
That is correct, Steve D.
Until further notice, EVERY Apple system update that restarts your device (iOS or macOS) turns Apple Intelligence on before you can drill through settings to disable it. This means Apple Intelligence has now joined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in being auto-enabled every time an update restarts a device.
There is a clever trick that works (for now): Set the Apple Intelligence Language to something other than your system default. This means if your device uses English, change Apple Intelligence to use something like Spanish or French. When the next update happens and your device restarts, Apple will switch the Language back to your default, but Apple Intelligence will not be enabled (presumably because it is a separate step?)
This trick worked for a few of us who tried it before the latest patch. Just remember to go in and verify Apple Intelligence is off and then change the Language to a mismatching selection again after an update.
…at least until Apple gets more languages working with Siri/AI, or corrects the mismatched language halt to Apple Intelligence activation after updates.
I updated from 15.3.1 to 15.3.2 yesterday which included a restart. Apple Intelligence was not turned on.
I also have Siri turned off. Maybe that’s the difference.
I have discovered another way to prevent an update re-enabling Apple Intelligence on my iPhone
Hope that helps, means you don’t have to turn Siri off.
is there a way to block Apple I from even downloading in the first place like with Little Snitch or similar, ie blocking the server that the Mac is contacting for the data?
After a friend updated to 15.4 on an M4 mini, System Settings only showed “Siri”. There was no “Apple Intelligence”. Opening the Siri panel indicated that it was OFF along with its related settings, and I saw the previous non-English language setting had stuck.
Of course, the Wi-Fi was turned back on as usual…
If Wi-Fi isn’t connecting to any access points, does it matter?
I ask because AirDrop requires Wi-Fi - it uses Bluetooth for discovery and sending requests, but creates an ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection for the actual data transfer.
My desktop Mac always has Wi-Fi enabled but not connected to any access point, just so it can create these connections for AirDrop. For everything else, network connectivity is via Ethernet.
iOS 18.4 continues to attempt “fixing” any Language settings mis-match in the Apple Intelligence/Siri panel. But this update still did not go farther than that. (To clarify, with Apple Int. language changed to not match the system AND Apple Int. turned off, the iOS update still only corrected the language setting but did NOT go a step further and turn Apple Int. back on.) Also having Siri turned off may be part of this equation.
As for the Wi-Fi auto-enabling after an update, that is something which has been occurring with macOS and iOS for a while. It does not necessarily relate to this issue, but if you purposely disabled Wi-Fi before restart for any reason (including prevention of Apple Int. downloads), it is somewhat relevant.
Interestingly, recent macOS updates have NOT re-enabled Bluetooth as I have seen in the past.
We are seeing iOS and macOS devices that have kept Apple Intelligence OFF storing around 7.8 GB of data (according to the displayed storage values).
Not sure if this is due to the small window of time before people switch Apple Int. back off post-update or something else.