Siri AI is very capable, but *I* should have control over when and whether *I* decide to enable or completely delete it.

I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.

(You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)

Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.

Our experiences diverge surprisingly far. The new Siri was worse for everything I use it for before I turned it off.

The new Siri can not reliably return the weather (it seems it's prompting on the literal text of the town and asks for a clarification sometimes about whether I am in the United States or United Kingdom), and when I ask "what is the air quality index", the new Siri would sometimes return the definition of AQI. When it returns a value, new Siri would hallucinate an incorrect and fixed value. In the cases where it does work, it's very much slower than the classic "rainbow orb" Siri.

I get that these are things you might do regularly and feel more empowered to use Siri for them... but they're rather banal and could be done with literally a one or two step process previously, especially if you're already using Apple's first-party apps which seem to be a requirement here. In both email cases, Spotlight handles searches like that just fine, and moving a calendar event only requires clicking and dragging.

I'm here wondering why so much extra space is warranted, or how to take it back, not so much how I can find a document with specific text in it or use Siri to do something else that was already very easy.

One task I'm wondering about is for example, asking Siri (on the mac) to analyze a huge dump of arbitrary PDFs that may or may not have non-OCRed text in them, and efficiently reorg and rename them based on what the documents should be. This also seems like a mundane task, but requires a little more than just a standard search and would allow someone to take their entire paper archive of private business documents and create a digital archive without too much risk or work. This is something that all local models I've tried so far really struggle with.

> "What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.

> The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.

Where you see convenience, I see a security nightmare.

A couple of things I've done with Apple Intelligence on the Mac:

* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.

* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.

Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.

I still don't see a good reason to upgrade from Sequoia.

macOS 27 is way faster and more stable than macOS 26 though, so unless you are on an ancient version it doesn't make sense to not upgrade.

Time to permanently offboard from Apple ecosystem then

Though what about security fixes?

why is a local model any different than any other file they want to install with their os?

Not ideal, but their disk space recovery thing in settings can do I believe.