I said no and Apple said yes
A blogger reports that Apple has removed the ability to fully disable 'Apple Intelligence' features in macOS 27, leading to concerns over user consent and privacy. The author criticizes the forced installation of AI tools and the resulting consumption of disk space.
Why it matters
This reflects growing user frustration with 'forced' AI integration in operating systems and the erosion of granular control over personal computing environments.
Tuesday 22 Sept 2026 Play Synthesised Audio
The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025 , I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.
At the time Apple were generous enough to provide a setting to disable this feature.
Although they hid the second part deeper, because why should saying “no” be easy?
macOS 15 Apple Intelligence privacy setting.
Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment and upgraded macOS 15 to 27. I only skipped one major version, Apple skipped 10!
And today I discovered that Apple had removed the “no” switch.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in