Posted by ano-ther 23 hours ago
"What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.
The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Since learning Spanish I get a lot more Spanish stuff in my feeds, and if I e.g. don't understand a meme I'll just ask "explain the joke here" and it reads the screen and explains it.
You can have an article open in Safari and say "remind me to read this tonight" and it'll make a reminder with the link. Or you can modify reminders - "move my reminder to get groceries to tomorrow at the same time". Yesterday I told it to make me a reminder and it did, but I worded it in a clunky way so I followed it with "reword that to sound more natural" and it did it.
We've been trained for a long time to think Siri can't do anything but I urge you to try it once you're on the new one, it's quite good. And I'm sure I've barely touched all the things it can do. David Pogue published a pretty thorough test other day:
https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri
I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.
(You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)
Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.
"privacy is a right"
becomes
privacy is a "defaults write <obscure-key>"
I don't know why, but I usually can only get Camera Remote to work when I close all of the recent apps on my Apple Watch, even when my watch and phone were the newest ones Apple released. Probably a bug with memory management they're never going to fix. Now, that's not possible, even when I reboot my watch :(
You mean the way that takes 20x as long?
I'm here wondering why so much extra space is warranted, or how to take it back, not so much how I can find a document with specific text in it or use Siri to do something else that was already very easy.
One task I'm wondering about is for example, asking Siri (on the mac) to analyze a huge dump of arbitrary PDFs that may or may not have non-OCRed text in them, and efficiently reorg and rename them based on what the documents should be. This also seems like a mundane task, but requires a little more than just a standard search and would allow someone to take their entire paper archive of private business documents and create a digital archive without too much risk or work. This is something that all local models I've tried so far really struggle with.
And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
Not to mention these are tasks I'll be able to do in winter while wearing gloves.
The new Siri can not reliably return the weather (it seems it's prompting on the literal text of the town and asks for a clarification sometimes about whether I am in the United States or United Kingdom), and when I ask "what is the air quality index", the new Siri would sometimes return the definition of AQI. When it returns a value, new Siri would hallucinate an incorrect and fixed value. In the cases where it does work, it's very much slower than the classic "rainbow orb" Siri.
If you have used mac/iOS (esp. Mac; well, because on iOS you can't do anything other than what's on screen essentially) for a long time you might realise Apple, at this point, is simply not capable of even developing those features that will allow users to do such things. And you don't even have to know Swift/objC for this sad realisation. I am pretty sure someone would have mentioned and they'd have realised it meant moving around a million hardcoded modules and frameworks and turning on/off a billion flags (a lot of them potentially global). They are that incompetent when it comes to software.
* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.
* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.
Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.
Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.
There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:
We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about
the way it handles user data [1]:
A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of
fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to
perform the operations requested by the user. User data stays on the
PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is
returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request,
and no user data is retained in any form after the response is
returned. User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with
administrative access to the production service or hardware.
Unlike your insurance provider or credit card company, which keep your prescription details, Apple Intelligence deletes the data once you receive a response—a fact Apple could verify if necessary.
It appears I did not need the cloud; my prescription information stayed on my iPhone to create the request, thanks to the Apple Foundation models running locally.
> The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Where you see convenience, I see a security nightmare.
Especially if the whole point is to have it search through a giant pile of arbitrary un-vetted stuff, like all the emails you ever received from anybody.
Not a bad list from Apple.
This time I took the plunge and upgraded, and I have to admit the whole system, especially Safari is much more snappy than before.
I would rather keep my personal picture library on my local disk (with backups, of course) than gigabytes and gigabytes of Apple models.
They were the ones who thought that 256Gb was a reasonable number. And it actually did work pretty well, until they wanted to fill it with models.
Lucky for us, macOS 27.2 is already in beta: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/21/apple-seeds-macos-27-2-...
This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.
If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.
Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.
For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.
The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.
[1]: https://cotypist.app
MacOS 27 is also diffrent in that it does still downloads the data for EU users and removes or hides options in menues to dissable functionality. This means users lose the said space when upgrading to 27.
The "Always verify important details. Siri is an Al that may make mistakes." is the new version of "your mileage may vary".
Also, I get a similar message when using Gemini, OpenAI and Claude.
I own a "Standard iPhone" and an M1 Mac; these numbers track.
Not all of the space used by Apple Intelligence is downloaded model size, which explains the reasonable difference.
I'm not upset, just pointing out TweakTown gave Apple's AI misleading information about Apple's products. You might have 30GB of wasted space on your 128GB drive due to Apple Intelligence features on your Mac (like me).
A 256GB Mac Mini is effectively unable to use macOS 27 due to this bloated nonsense.