Is Apple Intelligence Stealing Your Mac's Storage? Here's How to Turn It Off
In September, Apple introduced the future of its operating systems by unleashing iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, alongside the official rollout of its upgraded AI-powered Siri assistant. The only problem is that now many users have reported Apple Intelligence is hogging a significant amount of on-device storage. But what can you actually do about this?If you're not using Apple Intelligence, it is possible to turn it off.
- ▪In September, Apple introduced the future of its operating systems by unleashing iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, alongside the official rollout of its upgraded AI-powered Siri assistant.
- ▪The only problem is that now many users have reported Apple Intelligence is hogging a significant amount of on-device storage.
- ▪But what can you actually do about this?If you're not using Apple Intelligence, it is possible to turn it off.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-apple-intelligence-stealing-your-macs-storage-heres-how-to-turn-it-off |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 26 12:18:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T12:42:31.795Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T12:42:31.795Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | fUc9bkF419AO · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In September, Apple introduced the future of its operating systems by unleashing iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, alongside the official rollout of its upgraded AI-powered Siri assistant. The only problem is that now many users have reported Apple Intelligence is hogging a significant amount of on-device storage. But what can you actually do about this?If you're not using Apple Intelligence, it is possible to turn it off. But whether you'll be able to reclaim this unused disk space varies depending on which OS you're using.Why Is Apple Intelligence Taking Up So Much Space?The reason, of course, is privacy. Given Apple's value proposition as the only big name in tech not dependent on harvesting your data, its AI implementation depends on on-device processing.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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