Tell HN: iOS 27 does not allow Apple Intelligence to be disabled
I'm surprised that this didn't get more attention during the Beta period. iOS 26 had a toggle you could select to disable all Apple Intelligence features. That toggle was removed for iOS 27. Every AI feature has to be turned off individually: https://archive.ph/AE72I There is a way of turning it off through Content Restrictions in Screen Time, but one Redditor reported that doing this disables CarPlay for some reason. This is pretty disappointing.
Discussion Highlights (5 comments)
neilalexander
There is a “Turn off Siri” option. Apple Intelligence & Siri are now effectively one.
rgovostes
There is no actual feature called "Apple Intelligence", it's a marketing term for a handful of disparate features that they are applying everywhere. Is the excellent OCR that lets me select text within an image Apple Intelligence? It uses local models. Or the prediction engine that optimizes battery life by backgrounding apps you're less likely to use, or applies updates while you're sleeping? What about the Latent Semantic Mapping text classification framework, which uses language models for fuzzy document search -- and has been around since 2007? It wouldn't have made sense in the past to add a master kill switch for all these features, and it doesn't really make sense now to have one for the latest iteration.
hnburnsy
Just like notifications in iOS that cannot be disabled globally.
aristofun
That really is a bummer, especially on basic older models where 8-20Gb of space wasted on this gimmick even if turned off is not nothing.
skeledrew
So interesting. Before, it was great rejoicing, smugness and whatever other related expressions when headlines were saying "Apple is sitting out AI". Now, there's evidence that it isn't the case, and there's... mostly silence, and some mild disappointment. Everywhere else there is outrage and strong feeling expressed about how Y company is slipping AI into everything, but not when it comes to the fruit company. Of course they can do no wrong; it's always the user who's at fault and needs to adopt the correct(ed) path. Funny people.