I'm surprised that this didn't get more attention during the Beta period.
iOS 26 had a toggle you could select to disable all Apple Intelligence features.
That toggle was removed for iOS 27. Every AI feature has to be turned off individually: https://archive.ph/AE72I
There is a way of turning it off through Content Restrictions in Screen Time, but one Redditor reported that doing this disables CarPlay for some reason.
This is pretty disappointing.
rgovostes3 hours ago
There is no actual feature called "Apple Intelligence", it's a marketing term for a handful of disparate features that they are applying everywhere.
Is the excellent OCR that lets me select text within an image Apple Intelligence? It uses local models. Or the prediction engine that optimizes battery life by backgrounding apps you're less likely to use, or applies updates while you're sleeping? What about the Latent Semantic Mapping text classification framework, which uses language models for fuzzy document search -- and has been around since 2007?
It wouldn't have made sense in the past to add a master kill switch for all these features, and it doesn't really make sense now to have one for the latest iteration.
_boffin_3 hours ago
i really thought "Apple Intelligence" is the addition of data into Knowledge.db, but i guess not.
iAMkenough3 hours ago
Yes, but at the end of the day they took away a toggle that allowed you to remove the latent models you don’t use and reclaim space you need.
With Apple Intelligence disabled and ~8GB reclaimed, you could still OCR, still use Siri, still separate subject from background, translate text, so on and such.
Now it’s all or nothing, shoving LLM weights into 128GB of storage for some people.
There’s a better approach.
layer83 hours ago
CNET says that the OS auto-reclaims the space when needed: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-turn-...
iAMkenough37 minutes ago
That’s actually more frustrating, since it qualifies with “that now-inactive space” after disabling Siri.
To me that means if you go with the “nothing” route and disable Siri, the local latent models aren’t removed from storage until your device fills up, with the hope you enable Siri again.
Akin to all of Microsoft's apps with disparate Windows features pre-installed and unable to be removed from your device except through Storage Sense.
hnburnsyan hour ago
Just like notifications in iOS that cannot be disabled globally.
neilalexander3 hours ago
There is a “Turn off Siri” option. Apple Intelligence & Siri are now effectively one.
metaltyphoon2 hours ago
Didn’t matter, the space on disk still not reclaimed. On my macbook air it’s 35GB