It’s a MacBook Air with an M4 chip.
This ai stuff has gotten ridiculous. I didn’t ask for this and don’t want it. I want my 32 gig of storage back.
Edit: Found the instructions. Man is it complicated. They really don’t want you to turn off this monster.
Ew.
I have an M1 Macbook Air running Tahoe and just left Apple Intelligence switched off. No issues. I don’t have a use case for any of the AI shit.
This has seriously made me reconsider upgrading to Golden Gate.
So send them your opinion about it. The more that complain the more likely they will make it optional.
thanks for sharing! i really regret updating to 27 on my m1 macbook air
I’ve got 2 MacBook Air. Upgraded the newer one.
Definitely not upgrading the other one, or my iPhone, or my iPad.
I don’t have the storage space too deal with the crapple.
- Buy a Purism librem 16 with anti interdiction
- Smash macbook
Got any suggestions that don’t cost thousands of dollars and take tens of hours to implement?
I always love “how do I fix X” posts because there’s always that one schmuck who comments “you buy some entirely different product instead”.
Gee. Thanks. Real helpful mate.
Turn off the Apple Intelligence features in System Settings. It will delete the model.
Yes. Very complicated.
No it won’t.
I’ve done that and it still is holding onto the hard drive space.
They lied.
They lied to us!
They did not.
The models are deleted gradually (usually within an hour but some report it taking up to a day depending on how much other storage management is queued up). If you want instant deletion there is a manual process.
https://apple.gadgethacks.com/how-to/how-to-remove-apple-intelligence-models-on-mac-in-macos-27/
Breath. It’s OK to be upset at a situation. But attacking other users who are trying to help you is pointless and immature.
There are potentially up to two AFM 3 Core models downloaded when you enable Apple Intelligence. If your machine has an M3 or later SoC with ≥ 12GB memory, it will download the second advanced model which is larger.
When you disable the feature, the models are queued for deletion. They do not get offloaded instantly. That is, if using this method, you must wait for deletion to happen automatically.
You can often hasten the deletion by rebooting the machine then letting it run its storage management routines in the background. Here are other tips:
- To remove I/O throttling of background storage management tasks queued (like spotlight mdstore indexing, Time Machine snapshots, etc) you can open a terminal and run
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0. This setting is cleared on reboot. - Assuming you’re on AC power, you can disable idle, system, and disk sleep for 24 hours (24*60*60 seconds) to ensure the computer stays awake allowing background storage management daemons to continue by opening a terminal and running the command
caffeinate -ism -t 86400.
I added links ina separate comment which include the alternate manual process of deletion, but I would suggest trying the official supported method first.
Again, it is not instant. You are not being lied to. Please have patience and don’t attack people trying to help.
- To remove I/O throttling of background storage management tasks queued (like spotlight mdstore indexing, Time Machine snapshots, etc) you can open a terminal and run
I deleted my other comment because I may not have understood the news correctly when I first read it. Macrumors goes over this here https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/23/apple-intelligence-30gb-some-macs-macos-27/
I don’t use Mail and have no accounts configured, so I can’t get to the Settings page without setting up an account first. Would deleting the Mail app have the same effect? EDIT: Apparently you can’t delete the Mail app. SMH
I can’t seem to turn off Realistic Images in Screen Time > Contents & Privacy too.
It’s bullshit that this isn’t just one toggle like what Firefox did with their AI features.
Here is the feed back link. Let them now what you think. But be aware that is you fill your message with curse words they probably will just delete it.
I posted my displeasure about the ai on their community support forum and they immediately deleted the line. “They really don’t want you to turn their monster off. It’s like they really love their Frankenstein monster more than their customers.”
Oh no my devices are just outdated enough to not support Apple Intelligence, I’m getting left behind from (checks notes)… email summaries and writing prompts in a journaling app I forgot about.
