Comment by roody15
10 months ago
When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.
You are not prompted or asked to enable.
After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored.
This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality. Looks like they are moving to more dark user methods seen in Windows 11.
This is not a bug, it's a feature.
By "volunteering" your data for third party advertising (...remember, you agreed to Apple's ToS), they get to sell referrals and you get nothing.
Sounds fair?
My main Apple computers predate modern LLMs, and will forever be stuck on Ventura & 10.14. The M4 Mini I just purchased (to replace MacPro5,1) will never go online, and I have physically removed all wireless "features" [why does bluetooth constantly turn itself back on?!] — love the OS (particularly the fluidity of screensavers) but the OS is so enmeshed in wanting to "be helpful" (== I don't want your AI schizo ==) that I won't plan to update any online machines any further than 2023 operating systems (== "pre-AI" ==).
The best news in all this is it may finally push me into running Linux as my main online machine, which I've been putting off for only three decades now (68k->PPC->Intel->Silicone).
I thought only MS was doing that. I have over 25 admin on/off switches for copilot in the M365 ecosystem that were forced ON in the last year. On the power platform- The authorized consent to move data between regions for ai was AUTOMATICALLY set to YES also and it was sending prod data around to read it and give advice. I guess they sneak it in with some EULA update.. When I open tickets I always get sent to the wrong copilot team because they cant keep track of it and I have to go through a forced AI agent before opening tickets also now. The rushed updates broke a lot of their own JS and its been a bad bad year with over 200 hours wasted on this since last year where I normally spend less than 40 hours a year with such nonsense.
That seems completely illegal.
Legality only matters when the law is enforced. That's basically never been the case when it comes to privacy or corporation-against-consumer fraud.
> After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled
Lemme list some of my recent nitpicks:
I never used Bluetooth that much because I had no devices either for the phone or tablet, so I kept it disabled. But every major or minor iOS update was turning it on - I ofc understand that some devices may want to reconnect after update. But that doesn't explain why since v18.2.1 it suddenly stays disabled in my case on both devices after update's done.
Then there's iOS ongoing conversation screen that never ever allows me to access springboard when I want e.g. check the notifications. It just constantly pops up like on rubber-band and after few angry swipes, pressing the lock button back and forth finally lets me in. Do I by any chance "hold it wrong"? No idea but widget shouldn't block me from accessing phone - it should allow to swipe up and hide into status bar area.
And the control center changes in the latest iOS: these little widgets are stubborn, reorder themselves, can't change the size and tend to bug out to the point of flying "outside" the grid. It is baffling they managed to finally add icons custom positions on springboard but control center is like beta of the feature that should be here years ago.
Yesterday I've got a homepod mini for all the plugs, switchers and so on. Because for few years iPad cannot be the hub. During initial device asks for few things, like enabling voice recognition, location and then there's Apple Music offer for free for 3 months. I'm not using it and it will rather stay that way but now the offer is permanently presented in both tablet and phone settings right under my account and "family" represented by me and my partner.
After seeing the predatory tactics, dark patterns in last 2 Windows releases (I'll skip Google - because that's their default behavior for years) it seems that Apple too caught the trend. But also quality of the software overall isn't there anymore - no matter which company. Instead we're getting visual changes, or doubtful features that are being forced upon us like this Apple Intelligence or photos scanning.
I'll just hop on this chain since you commented recently.
I recently updated a very carefully managed (over many years) local Apple Music library to sync with cloud Apple Music. One funny (captive laughter) side effect was performance issues I had long since learned to live with just disappeared. For some insane reason running a completely local library is much, much laggier than one that is constantly syncing with the cloud.
The real fun, however, was when I recently created a smart playlist and noticed it was missing tracks that obviously should have been matched. I luckily found an older smart playlist with the same rule and lo and behold this one contained the tracks that were missing. So two smart playlists, exact same single rule (equating to "not Favourited"), with > 1000 difference in total tracks.
This is stressing me out. How can I trust any of my smart playlists anymore? Is my library corrupt, or is it just a bug? Who knows, and who knows when or if it will ever be fixed. I can list numerous other bugs with playlists in the macOS Apple Music app that have existed across 2 or more previous major releases.
Set your Mac to English (UK) and Siri to English (US), or the other way around. Then it will complain that Apple Intelligence only works if Siri and your Mac have the same language.
Problem solved B-).
> and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.
That feature is so misunderstood, it feels like no one read the help text or tried it and is just going off the misplaced outrage of everyone else.
That setting is not about sending information to Apple, it is a personal private report for yourself.
There are enough legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, we don’t need to make up a problem which isn’t there and distract from the ones that exist.
I don't want any goddamn reports!
Which is a valid but entirely different complaint from claiming those reports are being sent every 15 minutes. What sense would that even make? They could just log your data anyway without you knowing or providing a setting for it. Why would they make it a toggle for something you need to provide authentication to access?
2 replies →
True Tone is also turned on after every OS update.
This is particularly annoying when you calibrate your screen for some modicum of colour accuracy.
Bluetooth is also turned on after every OS update. I don't understand why macOS does these. They can't be bugs because they have been around for years.
Because a newb might complain that their earbuds/pencil is not working.
That they cannot be bugs definitely does not follow. One look at Windows tray icons, monitor recognition, sound volume management, and many other things will tell you that much. Broken since forever. So definitely big companies and tech giants can keep bugs in there for many years. Also note the bugs on iOS described by someone else here in this thread.
My current plan is to basically never move on from macOS 14 and perhaps move away from macOS entirely when the time arrives that I’d be forced to upgrade (new hardware needed, etc)
For reasons I am not sure about,
When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.
From then on any updates and bug fixes are only available on the latest macOS
If you don't upgrade to the latest and greatest macOS you are out of luck.
I fear the day when all new apps must target the M* chip and everyone on the x64 side has a paperweight
This made even worse when Apple dictates when your computer is no longer allowed to run the latest and greatest OS¹.
On the Windows side, a majority of applications tend to work on a wider range of operating systems.
¹ There are various ways of bypassing this and installing the latest OS in a most unsupported manner.
> When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.
This is encouraged by Apple to help with their planned obsolescence of old OS versions. With new macOS versions there is often a requirement to rebuild your apps with the latest version of Xcode which ships alongside it. This is because Apple changes lots of its internal APIs etc between OS versions, and only the latest version of Xcode supports those changes.
Also the App stores only allow new and update submissions for apps built with the latest SDK, which in turn must be coded on the latest version of Xcode, which itself cannot be run on older versions of macOS.
Is this all a conspiracy to keep people buying new computers and phones? I cannot say, but if I wanted to keep people bying more of my product this is how I would do it.
2 replies →
I think it's OK as long as I can keep my development tools and productivity tools.
I'm intrigued by Apple products because my working laptop is a MacBook Pro. I'm thinking about buying one for studying MacOS internals and app development, so as long as I'm not forced to update XCode, homebrew, caffeine, sublime text and a few other tools, I think it's fine.
One man's "dark pattern opt-in" is another man's "stunning rate of user adoption".
This issue was so annoying since “apple intelligence” debuted. I would have to manually toggle off for each device that updated.
But at least since 15.3.0, for me, it’s no longer an issue.
What is even worse is that I have all automatic updates turned off but my mac still auto updates all the time.
Apple intelligence cannot be enabled in my country, yet sometimes when I do an action in Mail (desktop), I get a popup with a summary of my email asking me something about it.
> After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled.
This should be criminal. And I believe it might actually be criminal in EU.
This was also the case for iOS 18.3.0 and 18.3.1.