How to Disable Apple Intelligence on iPhone, Mac, iPad
Apple Intelligence is an intriguing and powerful set of AI features available on the latest models of Mac, iPhone, and iPad with modern versions of system software. These AI features are tied to ChatGPT and range from useful writing and summarization tools, to business plan creation, to writing emails on your behalf, image generation with Image Playground, and more, but not everyone has an interest in these sort of features.
If you’re an iPhone, Mac, or iPad user and you want to turn off Apple Intelligence features on your devices, read along to learn how to do that.
How to Turn Off Apple Intelligence on Mac
Turning off Apple Intelligence on the Mac is easy:
- Go to the Apple menu and choose System Settings
- Go to “Apple Intelligence & Siri”
- Toggle the switch for Apple Intelligence to the OFF position
- Confirm that you want to disable Apple Intelligence on the Mac
The feature will be disabled immediately and you will no longer have access to the various AI tools on the Mac.
How to Disable Apple Intelligence on iPhone & iPad
Turning off Apple Intelligence on iPhone and iPad is a simple settings toggle:
- Open the “Settings” app and choose “Apple Intelligence & Siri”
- Toggle the setting for “Apple Intelligence” to the OFF position
- Confirm that you want to disable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone or iPad
With Apple Intelligence turned off, you will no longer have access to the variety of AI features on iPhone or iPad.
An interesting side benefit of disabling Apple Intelligence is that doing so recovers around 7GB of storage space on your device, so if you’re tight on storage, you can regain storage by disabling the AI feature on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Note that if you do not have these settings options available on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, that means you do not have Apple Intelligence support on that particular device, and there is nothing to turn off or disable.
Like any other setting, you can always reverse course and make a quick settings adjustment to re-enable the feature if you so choose.
It’s worth pointing out that some Mac, iPhone, and iPad users have never enabled the feature themselves, but have found that Apple Intelligence turns itself on automatically after installing a system software update onto their device, so therefore if you have no interest in the feature or having it enabled on your device, you might want to peak into settings anyway.
Do you use Apple Intelligence or did you disable it? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments.
On my system, I have different languages for Siri and the OS: British vs American. Neither my native language. Pure accidental. I can’t be bothered, English is English. But Apple is! The Siri – A.I. preference dialog tells me explicitely, “Apple Intelligence requires that Mac and Siri are set to the same language.” So _no_ Apple Intelligence running on my Mac. I don’t have to think about it, no OS update sofar has changed this. It is installed, 5 GB added to the now huge pile of unused Apple features on this computer. You may like it, I don’t need it, fine.
Apple AI installed on my iPad without giving me an option to decline, just said continue. I uninstalled it but by that time it had migrated to my phone and there is no uninstall option on the phone because there is no “apple AI” app on it. the behavior is the same as having it installed.
The other irritating and problematic issue is that on the Mac, every time MacOS is updated (even point updates), the System Settings toggle for Apple Intelligence is reset/restored to the “on” position even if the user previously toggled it off.
Let it be known that simply toggling off Apple Intelligence on either the iPhone/iPad or Mac will NOT clear the ~6GB of space that it is consuming. I have *heard* that this space is only cleared when the device deems it’s necessary and the device is actually low on storage. Otherwise, it just sits there consuming the storage space. The user (once again) has no choice. Reminds me of years ago when Apple auto-pushed iOS updates to your device with no way for the user to delete the update…aside from actually installing it. If I didn’t install it, chances are very good that I didn’t want it to begin with.
They’re pushing this on everyone with a compatible device because of the deal with OpenAi. The problem is that it’s still in beta.
Did you just use the words ‘useful’ in association with Apple Intelligence? Really?