Posted by alwillis 4 hours ago
I will never touch this garbage and would rather use the disk space I purchased to be used for my purposes, not the industry's pointless fad bubble endeavors.
I honestly do not understand what the 28GB Tahoe update contained. Like, I cannot imagine what all the code does. It'd take a lifetime to actually go through it all, and yet, here I am just using the same programs I did before it, just with rounder corners and some other pretty things. Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.
The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.
The rounded corners you speak of also hamper tap and touch targets for users with motor disabilities. The rounded corners make icons and other elements less distinct, increasing the possibility of touch or tap errors.
It's investors isn't it.
1. I was around in the 90’s; nothing today is that bad.
2. Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. You don’t realize how useful personal context is until you have it.
Something like “When was the last time I went to that pizza place downtown?”—it just works.
When you call the airline about your flight, your flight info automatically shows up.
Siri is completely useless.
The pitch isn’t that it will replace claude or codex runing 284 agents vibeslopping for me. It’s that Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant.
It has a ways to go on some of the productivity stuff, and third parties have work to do, but that’s fine. They built a better foundation than anyone else has for its purpose.
At the same time, ask stock ChatGPT when your next dentist appointment is. It can’t but Siri AI can.
Its quite the paradox when Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence so hard, yet their assistant that's been around for 15 years can't do even basic things now.
It allows me to save money by calling a model on the users device rather than spending tokens (or forcing the user to spend tokens).
I can imagine a home automation app helping you build a workflow with an LLM. Or an RSS reader giving you a short summary of each article. A health app being able to pull recipes into a standard format. Maybe a fitness app being able to search your workout history if you give it good tools.
Idk I usually use my phone for reading HN on the toilet and listening to podcasts while cleaning, not much else. I don’t know what else people even do with a phone lol. But those are things I’ve done in the past that LLMs could be helpful for!
But also voice-to-text, (certain kinds of) search, document summarization, are common things that I could see many apps using Apple Intelligence for.
1. Lose the user, make him struggle to find items in the Start menu (Windows), struggle to type words on the keyboard (iOS), or struggle to manage find their subscription (Atlassian),
2. ???
3. Profit
If it's a dark pattern, I'd like to know what step 2 is. Who knows, maybe the goal is to overwhelm the user and it's a spy operation from the KGB.
time-travelling KGB operatives from 1991.
I was hoping Siri AI could help more in the GUI automation world, but it seems that is not the case.
For example, I was hoping Siri AI could create a Shortcut that would clear/dismiss all notification banners. Nope, it can’t even access nor see notifications.
I have my own scripts and whatnot to handle these desires, but I am just tired of having to rework a lot of them for each OS release.
Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.
Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.
What does the toggle on for "Image creation" mean? Is that now restricted? Or is toggle off mean it is restricted?
This is obviously intentional.
For instance (this is just sequoia, but same for ios) searching for "improve" finds:
"improve assistive voice features" (I turned it off)
and diagnostic & usage data with: "improve siri & dictation" (I turned it off)
but under spotlight, it doesn't find "help apple improve search" (I turned that off too)
Not sure what went wrong for you, these results seem pretty much on point.
The other day “login” didn’t produce Login Items. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you tried it right now and it worked fine.
If you have kids, "Screen Time" is a reasonable enough name for the place where parental controls live.
If you work under the assumption that AI features are OK in general, but potentially problematic around kids in particular, parental controls are a reasonable enough place to put these AI controls.
If you're not a parent, and have broader concerns about AI, you'd never even think of looking for these options where they are.
This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
It's great that they're on device and all, but how incredibly stupid.
Not to say they wouldn't try...
On iOS 27, it looks like changing the settings for eight different apps taking 5 or 6 steps each.
https://archive.ph/AE72I#selection-712.0-731.53
Original: https://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-turn-off-apple-intelligenc...
(I have a Macbook that I use for various things. Other than lack of access to the Apple Store, I don't feel like I'm missing anything from not having an iCloud account.)
Short answer: Maybe, but I've never tried it.
Little Snitch is aware of various system-level network connections, but I don't know if they're granular enough to block the AI only.
You can verify this yourself. Get an old laptop to act as a wifi hotspot and forward traffic over usb ethernet adapter to your actual router. Then run tcpdump on the computer. You will see the multitude of phone-home traffic.
> As it turned out, this behavior is on purpose. There’s an explicit whitelist that allows certain macOS services to bypass any third party firewalls and to communicate on the Internet without being even noticed by the user. A hole in the wall.
Was remediated later, but shows there is precedent.
What is "root" in macOS is more or less a power user role. Apple took away the true ability to operate as root a long time ago with System Integrity Protection which walls off the critical parts of the OS from the user entirely.
Unfortunately, SIP also restricts basic system functions that are trivial in other OSes. Apple made this very difficult, and MS would have loved to do this in Vista had they not received the backlash that they did.
But still, I fully share the sentiment that creators of an OS are perfectly capable of bypassing whatever there is running on top of it.
Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.