On one of my machines, I don’t know if I could even make it fit. So it’s a no-brainer to not update on that one, if they are going to force an extra 14GB download on me.
Perhaps eventually. I know I’m in a “closed ecosystem,” and that removes a fair bit of choice in a variety of places. But Apple is known to walk bad decisions back at times. This update is an example, with liquid glass. Another recent one was the iCloud private email planned domain change being scrapped.
I mean they added a slider to make Liquid Glass slightly less bad, but the “good” end is just the old “reduce transparency” option. They’ve got a lot of progress to make, if they are ever going to give us back the pre-liquid-glass UI density.
Liquid Glass was rushed out because their flagship WWDC feature, Apple Intelligence, wasn’t ready as expected. They knew they didn’t finish refining Glass as they had intended to. They had unfinished work with Glass that got pushed to this year due to the last minute change in direction. The refinements we got weren’t only the product of feedback and they already intended to revisit the design.
This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.
If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.
By that logic why not fill the hard drive with OS data? This is a company mind you that still sells some laptops with a base configuration of 256GB, so 10-20GB isn't an insignificant amount to many users especially when it's taken by a feature they may not even use.
Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.
For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.
The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.
I still don't see a good reason to upgrade from Sequoia.
I was skipping Tahoe too after seeing all those posts about the differently rounded corners.
This time I took the plunge and upgraded, and I have to admit the whole system, especially Safari is much more snappy than before.
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.
Being short on disk space is a pretty good reason to not upgrade.
I would rather keep my personal picture library on my local disk (with backups, of course) than gigabytes and gigabytes of Apple models.
They were the ones who thought that 256Gb was a reasonable number. And it actually did work pretty well, until they wanted to fill it with models.
On one of my machines, I don’t know if I could even make it fit. So it’s a no-brainer to not update on that one, if they are going to force an extra 14GB download on me.
macOS 15 still gets security updates.
That's what I use on my M1 Macbook Air too, works fine.
I've hit some really weird window/workspace UI bugs so far in MacOS27. It's not no-brainer update yet, IMO.
> I've hit some really weird window/workspace UI bugs so far in MacOS27.
Lucky for us, macOS 27.2 is already in beta: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/21/apple-seeds-macos-27-2-...
It keeps putting my left mounted dock on the wrong monitor for some reason. never happened before.
Time to permanently offboard from Apple ecosystem then
Perhaps eventually. I know I’m in a “closed ecosystem,” and that removes a fair bit of choice in a variety of places. But Apple is known to walk bad decisions back at times. This update is an example, with liquid glass. Another recent one was the iCloud private email planned domain change being scrapped.
I mean they added a slider to make Liquid Glass slightly less bad, but the “good” end is just the old “reduce transparency” option. They’ve got a lot of progress to make, if they are ever going to give us back the pre-liquid-glass UI density.
Liquid Glass was rushed out because their flagship WWDC feature, Apple Intelligence, wasn’t ready as expected. They knew they didn’t finish refining Glass as they had intended to. They had unfinished work with Glass that got pushed to this year due to the last minute change in direction. The refinements we got weren’t only the product of feedback and they already intended to revisit the design.
This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.
If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.
why is a local model any different than any other file they want to install with their os?
Well because it could be an extra ~20GB which is not nothing if you have a 256GB disk.
By that logic why not fill the hard drive with OS data? This is a company mind you that still sells some laptops with a base configuration of 256GB, so 10-20GB isn't an insignificant amount to many users especially when it's taken by a feature they may not even use.
It's 14GB of something I don't want, need, nor have any use for, on a machine that is notorious for making storage upgrades difficult.
because some people don't want AI and would rather even the files were not present in their computer.
I do want (some, carefully curated as to certain usecases) AI. But I don't want to waste my diskspace for this AI.
Friendly reminder:
Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.
For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.
The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.
[1]: https://cotypist.app
[2]: https://github.com/powtac/wtm
Though what about security fixes?