Apple: ‘Turn Off and Restrict Access to Apple Intelligence Features on Mac’

If you are uninterested in Apple Intelligence features, Apple has documentation on how to turn them off for Golden Gate, Tahoe, and Sequoia — kind of. While there are more granular controls for individual features in Golden Gate, Apple’s way of limiting access in older versions is only through Screen Time. But there is a trade-off: there is now no way to turn off Apple Intelligence entirely like there was in older versions. In Golden Gate, Apple Intelligence is just another system component. Whether you agree with Apple on that is your call, but one thing is a fact: it does not come cheap. Under MacOS Sonoma, pre-Apple Intelligence, system files consumed 18.4 GB in Ars Technica’s testing. Golden Gate is a whopping 42.9 GB. Not all of this disparity is Apple Intelligence models — on my Mac, the various model directories add up to about 18 GB, give or take — but on a lower-spec MacBook Neo, iMac, or Mac Mini, that means around one-sixth of the drive is consumed by the system. That is…