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Data Storage Desktops (Apple) Open Source Software Apple

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool (macrumors.com) 73

Posted by BeauHD from the AI-be-gone dept.
A new open-source command-line tool called RemoveMacAI lets macOS 27 users disable Apple Intelligence and reclaim around 12GB or more of storage. MacRumors reports: In macOS 27, Apple removed the toggle to disable Apple Intelligence wholesale, and simply disabling individual features doesn't remove the models from your Mac's drive. As explained by the developer, RemoveMacAI gets around this by using a configuration profile to switch off Apple's own asset management service and remove the models.

It then configures the system so attempts to download the removed models are redirected to a closed local port, preventing them from immediately coming back. And it does all this without disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) or manually deleting files from protected system locations, unlike some older tools have. The tool can free up roughly 12GB of space depending on which models are present on your Mac. That said, some users are reporting cases of Apple Intelligence models having taken up a lot more space, which they've now reclaimed.

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool More | Reply

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool

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  • Opt-in much? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Monday October 05, 2026 @02:16PM (#66364144)

    So first it was opt in, but because nobody really wanted or asked for it, it became opt out. Still, nobody wanted it, so now they don't even get a choice. And ifans wonder why I don't like apple.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nobody wondered because nobody cared.
    • The branding became an all encompassing thing and that was a mistake that had to be rectified. People thought of it all as summarising text, generating images and natural English commands (generative model use) and wanted to gut the lot because of it. It's similar to the mistake Mozilla made where they included a toggle to

      There's no relationship between what people want rid of and tab grouping in Safari, automated password changing in Passwords, an improved voice dictation model, grabbing related/relevan

      • ... a toggle to... ? what?

        WE'LL NEVER KNOW!

      • The branding became an all encompassing thing and that was a mistake that had to be rectified. People thought of it all as summarising text, generating images and natural English commands (generative model use) and wanted to gut the lot because of it. It's similar to the mistake Mozilla made where they included a toggle to

        Chop off the end of the first paragraph before submitting the form?

    • I remember when we all got pissed about Microsoft eating gigabytes of disk for a recovery partition. At least that had a use - we all know Windows will eat itself eventually and you'll have a convenient way to reinstall right there on-device.

      This eats even more space, with far less use.

  • Cost of SSD per GB (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by macmurph ( 622189 )

    Its great that people have an option to delete the model...fine. But keep in mind that they are saving somewhere between $1.32 and $6.00 depending on how much they pay for SSD storage. If you just want to offset 12GB to the cloud, 15GB of Google Drive is free. Considering that Siri actually works now, its probably worth keeping around.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Its great that people have an option to delete the model...fine. But keep in mind that they are saving somewhere between $1.32 and $6.00 depending on how much they pay for SSD storage.

      Oh look, this misleading bullshit was posted by someone whose name begins with "mac", what a shocker. Apple devices overwhelmingly don't have socketed storage (that is, almost none of them do any more) and they charge far more than the average for storage, and the average has gone up a lot to boot.

      More importantly, your OS vendor shouldn't be pushing bullshit you didn't want and don't need and makes your system less secure without your permission. That's some Microsoft shit. Apple is no better than Microsof

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        you know you can have more than one drive?

        • On a laptop? Unless you want the other drive trailing around by its USB cable that is not an option.

          Keep in mind that Tightwad Tim [Cook] kept 256 GB storage the base spec for a long time. In fact the brand new M6 Mac mini Still Ships With 256 GB, as does the Neo.

          One other note, multiple people reported that the actual AI storage is 25 to 30 GB.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by allo ( 1728082 )

            Depending on the laptop ... and USB is always an option. Modern USB standards have surprisingly high bandwidth.

            • When I'm sitting in a cramped airplane seat trying to get shit done, I super want to have three USB cables / devices plugged in on that tiny tray table. It's not annoying at all to have a rats nest of shit plugged into my sleek thin lightweight device to make it usable.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by allo ( 1728082 )

                So maybe you are the person who pays the upgrade for convenience instead of finding a cheaper solution. The choice is yours.

            • It's not about bandwidth, it's about latency. These days audio sample libraries are huge and the latency of loading these samples from an external drive causes lots of stuttering during playback. Some libraries have the capability of loading a portion of all samples into memory before playback to account for such latency, but many don't have this capability. And I find it funny that a company that goes to ridiculous lengths to shave off a fraction of a millimeter from their laptops for the sake of portab

        • You know there is performance degredation using USB / Thunderbolt to that "more than one drive" ? And on machines that have shockingly few external ports, just how much shit are we supposed to plug in everywhere we want to work?

      • Apple has been the single most fascist PC company for over a decade. Soldered ram, soldered ssd, no repair guides unless forced by law. Walled garden locked down hardware etc. Microsoft looks like saints in comparison.

    • Re:Cost of SSD per GB (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday October 05, 2026 @02:46PM (#66364222) Homepage Journal

      While it's soldered in SSD for many Mac models, so a post-purchase upgrade is generally not practical. And while the pricing is a little steeper than NVMe, closer to 40 cents a GB, that still puts the 12GB into around $5, perfectly in your suggested range. Perhaps people buying a 512GB Mac should consider a 1TB Mac (~$200 more) if they are concerned about space wasted by the OS install.

      Cloud storage is not equivalent to local storage. Not in how applications use it. Not in performance. And not in availability. The two are apples and oranges.

      I generally believe the end-users should decide what is installed on their computer. But most OS vendors do not offer full customization. It seems like every major one likes to put their pet projects into a device meant for general use. And power users with unusual use cases complain that the general purpose consumer device is not finely tuned to their special needs. So maybe people should consider running an obscure Linux distro if they are unhappy with bundled software found in essentially every mainstream computing device for consumers.

      • I generally believe the end-users should decide what is installed on their computer. But most OS vendors do not offer full customization.

        That's true, but a) that's crappy and b) they used to offer more, and the actually good OSes used to offer a lot more and still do. Unixes and Unixlikes other than OSX still generally allow you to install pretty small subsets of the OS.

        • My ideal OS is one that is just some minimal base that is enough to run a package manager and perhaps a small diagnostic suite and recovery. And everything else is a package on top. FreeBSD, some Linux distros, etc come very close to that ideal.

          • Same. When I install Linux I do a minimal install and then add only what I want. I am usually doing something weird on install so this is frequently the only way that makes sense.

    • Considering that Siri actually works now, its probably worth keeping around.

      Not so sure about that. I made it all the way to 6th October 2026 without AI models on my PC and still can't see why I would want one or why it would be worth wasting 12GB on.

    • But keep in mind that they are saving somewhere between $1.32 and $6.00 depending on how much they pay for SSD storage.

      False. SSDs are not sold on a per GB basis. You either have the space you need or you don't. If the latter is that you're 5GB short, then the direct cost and saving to you is the incremental upgrade to the next model of hardware which is $500 (ex-tax) for a Macbook Pro, or $100 for a Macbook Neo

      • Too bad nobody has invented a thing called Network Attached Storage. That would be sooo useful if it existed!

    • Can I take that 15GB of Google Drive with me where I don't have a network connection?

      Can I use that 15GB of Google Drive as lowest-latency disk for demanding things that require low latency? Nope - access time is measured in tens of ms in the best case, rather than orders of magnitude less (s) for local SSD.

      Stop simping.

      • Slashdot apparently still doesn't support the proper unicode for "micro" so my post got butchered. Should be the abbreviation of microseconds.

      • Yes, good point, I need nanosecond latency to all the data I have ever created plus all the data I have ever downloaded or else cardiac arrest. /s

        • You're the one measuring in cost per gigabyte, as if that's an option from literally anyone. I'm sorry if very real use cases aren't something you understand.

  • Damn (Score:2, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 )

    I didn't know I was so interesting there'd be 12 GB of shit on me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Apple charges $300 for an additional 512GB of SSD storage on a Macbook Air. So that 12GB is worth $7.

      • No it's worth the full $300. Storage is binary. You either have enough or you don't. If you are 12GB short, the only option is to pay full price to upgrade, you can't al-a-carte the number of GBs on your SSD. The idea of breaking this down to an individual per gigabyte cost is stupid as that option is not available for anyone.

        • the only option is to pay full price to upgrade

          Why don't you have he option for NAS, USB thumb drive, cloud storage, a VPN to your VPS, an external SSD, a network connection to any other computer, etc? You can even print some PDFs and put them in a storage unit.

          • Your answer to Apple using twelve or more gigabytes of users' disk space is they should print and delete some documents? Do you work for Adobe, or HP?

  • By wiping the drive entirely clean and installing a minimalist Linux on it, then only install apps as needed
    • Linux only runs on intel macs.

      Asahi runs on M1 and M2 but it's a half-baked buggy piece of shit. M3 thru m6 have no linux support and maybe never will due to hardware security models.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Not that easy on recent M series macs ,or so the rumors say, a better way wold be to go for a normal x64 lapotop if you want to run linux anywat

      • No, that would be the inferior way to go. Apple Silicon is faster, more power efficient than x64. And it runs ARM64 Ubuntu etc just fine.

  • It's still more than fast enough except for games (and I've got a ps5 for those) plus apple thankfully havent bothered to backport their models to x86, probably due to no neural shit in the cpu.

    • I actually just bought a refurbished 15" M4 MacBook Air (for various reasons), but I'm also hanging on to my Intel-based MacBook Pro since it's running fine. The latter machine currently has a small-ish Linux Mint partition alongside macOS, but I'm thinking of switching it to Linux-only.

      Note that, if you do this, you need carefully chose your distro if your Mac has the T2 security chip.

  • I would love for my devices to have their AI models local like Apple did. It is really annoying to say "Play song ABC" and even though ABC is a local file, my device goes to the cloud. But Apple gave customers privacy, security, and resiliency - and everyone complained that it took up space. So next time you want to complain that companies are requiring Internet connections for stuff that could be done locally, remember that someone tried and it was rejected.

    • Doing it right is asking whether you want it installed, not forcing it on you.

      Were you in a frat at Cornell or what?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kwerle ( 39371 )

        Doing it right is asking whether you want it installed, not forcing it on you.

        Yes, because users understand those kinds of choices.

        Were you in a frat at Cornell or what?

        Too soon!

        • Never too soon to point out that someone who doesn't respect choices in one area surely doesn't respect them in others.

  • Now we need independently produced software to remove and block re-installation of all the telemetry Apple of Microsoft have hidden in their operating systems.

  • Incredible (Score:3)

    by thePsychologist ( 1062886 ) on Monday October 05, 2026 @09:20PM (#66364716) Journal

    It's incredible that Apple would think that many users would even want this trash on their hard drives.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

      Really? This is the same company that forced a shitty U2 album on to everyone's devices. You think they learned something? Absolutely not.

    • You are dismissive without providing an argument. Siri AI works as advertised and is local and private. Whats not to like?

  • Windows is totally infested with AI spyware.
  • I'm sitting here with my Macbook Air running Macos 26. I'm amazed at how quickly someone has managed to fix this horrible change to version 27 when I didn't even know it was out yet. As a veteran (> 50 years) programmer I went to look at the sources briefly and I like how it's written. The docs are good too which gives me confidence in the app as a whole. Once I upgrade to 27 this will be the first thing I install. I'm not 100% against AI but I want the option to have it installed or not. about 99% of th

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