Comment by bredren
3 days ago
Apple’s Photos ecosystem is privacy oriented and as a result some (now) baseline features require the use of local models.
The Foundation models keep a surprisingly decent set of data available for fast filtering by a local LLM.
I’ve found a slower, second pass, is needed by Qwen to clean it up. (I am running on the new Mac Mini m5 pro 64gb.)
I’ve run my own tests using a date range, a short description of a red cedar planter box build I did last year, and a set of known correct photos.
There is some cool stuff you can do without sending your family’s pics up to any of the frontier model providers.
I've found some strange guardrails with the Foundation models. Like blocking describing of any photo with a single woman in it. It does this relatively consistently but with a different subset every time. Like out of 10 photos in the set, it's skips 6 then the next run, it skips 3. Have you seen guardrail issues like this?
I switched to Gemma 4 instead.
same i am using new embeddinggemma. seems far more capable than foundation models.
I am going to assume that means "a women by herself" and not that it can magically detect her marital status before refusing to continue (I suppose it could be laser-focused on wedding rings...)
No. Apple’s Photos ecosystem uploads all Photos effectively unencrypted to Apple in a way that is readable by Apple, allowing Apple to do server-side analysis of all content. This content is also provided to US or Chinese federal authorities without due process or warrants.
Nothing about iCloud Photos is private.
With Advanced Data Protection enabled (it's not available globally but it is in the US), Photos is E2EE.
Even with ADP on, it uploads the unique hashes of the PLAINTEXT of every photo to Apple, so they know who had what unique files, when, and who had them next, and when, etc. You can’t receive or transmit an original Winnie The Pooh meme between two phones with ADP on without Apple and the FBI knowing who had it first and when the second person received it.
Also insofar as ADP is off by default the whole system can NOT be said to be “privacy oriented”, which was the claim I was refuting.
Apple, for the most part, does not care about the privacy of their users. ADP would not be built today, and it will probably eventually be quietly removed (like it was in the UK), because ~nobody uses it.
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I don't want any of these features and yet they've been forced upon me and are now getting in the way of me actually using my computer how I want. Games and heavy applications slow down and stutter because of "AI" background processes, even with App Tamer, my machine runs too hot to even touch when just idling. Compared to when I got my M2 in '23 and thought, "This is the fastest and snappiest machine I've ever used", my experience with an M5 and the latest macOS version is nothing short of an anti-consumer hellscape.
Interesting, this has not been my experience at all. I have an M5 machine and I'm not even aware of what AI features have been added, and it's streets ahead of my old M1 Pro in speed.
peep the comment I just made to the adjacent commenter, that has been my experience. I basically have to run my fans at full speed all day while working now in order to type on my computer (when I'm not using my magic keyboard). It is like a huge problem, not even just a small one but like something that is affecting me negatively every single day, increasingly making me want to break this machine in half and disappear into the woods.
The M1 used to be adequate in speed. Then Apple kept adding always-on cloud daemons that run even if you don’t use iCloud.
My Macs run cool and silently. I've never observed a background "AI" process consuming resources.
It's not just AI processes. But things like mediaanalysisd, duetexpertd, etc. even the freaking menu bar agent, all regularly pound my computer both when idling and when in use.
I recently installed App Tamer which is helping a bit, but it doesn't allow me to tame everything. I just checked now and duetexpertd was trying to use nearly two full cores. I have all iCloud integrations turned off, I do not use iCloud at all, and I do not have an iPhone, so I am flabbergasted that this iCloud desktop-phone syncing process runs at such high core usage in the background with extreme regularity. Proof: https://imgur.com/VkBh9bi
Unfortunately, this does nothing for services such as WindowServer which now often takes up 50-100% of a core just on its own.
I have reinstalled and upgraded to the latest version. This MacBook is only a few months old.
While typing this message and literally just having open Codex with one running task that is not doing anything substantial, and Firefox, with no high CPU usage from any tab, my laptop got so hot that I had to use another installed program, Stats, to manually bump up the fan since macOS also has absolutely garbage native system fan controls.
I have fibromyalgia and seem to be sensitive to hot keys; my Thinkpad regularly getting to hot to touch with even light usage is EXACTLY why I went and bought a MacBook one morning in '23. One morning I touched my keyboard and realized I was tired of singeing the nerves on my fingertips and having them hurt for hours. So now in '26, finding myself in the same exact position but with a much more expensive computer, I feel like I am living in a corporate hellscape nightmare.
One thing I have noticed is all of my cores can sit idle except a single one and that will still heat up the machine a lot. If the hardware is designed as such, the software MUST be designed to work around this and not blast a core for 10 minutes straight every time one of a dozen or two misbehaving system processes wants to complete a background task. If the software is not designed for this, the hardware is incomplete and faulty. This would be true if it was shipped as firmware; software doesn't get a free pass here.
But now Pages and Numbers recommend document titles for me, so.... worth it?
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Huh, I hadn't seen App Tamer before, that's quite a neat bit of kit. St. Clair does serious work...
I'm glad I found it. Jettison looks like a nice tool as well. It's working great so far, just does what I need it to do. Fits in nicely with Stats, which I use for fan control and monitoring power consumption. I also found https://github.com/Digital-Shane/OpenTamer but figured App Tamer was still the more mature option.
I’m on an M1 workout these issues. How are you isolating them to be AI related?
medianalysisd for example, which frequently pummels 1-2 cores of my machine for long stretches of time, runs local on-device models to analyze the media on your machine.
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