Hands-On Mac 167

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
 

0:00:00 - Speaker 1
Coming up on Hands-On Mac, let's take a look at disabling the feature that is now enabled by default on your devices Apple Intelligence Stay tuned.

0:00:13 - Speaker 2
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0:00:32 - Speaker 1
Welcome back to Hands-On Mac. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at how to turn off Apple Intelligence on your various devices. This, of course, is a feature that is now enabled by default on your iPhone, your iPad. The feature, of course, gives you access to loads of Apple intelligence features, including generating emoji using writing tools, being able to access chat, gpt via Siri, and so many more. But some people don't want to make use of these features, and if you were looking to disable them, well, it is a possibility. So I'm going to show you how to do that. We'll start with macOS.

Here we are on macOS, and the first thing we'll do, and pretty much the only thing we have to do, is head into system settings and then, where we would typically find the Siri section, we now see the Apple Intelligence and Siri section. From here, we simply toggle off Apple Intelligence. You will get a prompt that says Apple Intelligence features like writing tools will not be available. If you continue, siri will also stop using the additional capabilities provided by Apple Intelligence. So, from that point on, not only will you not have access to writing tools, but any of the new smarts that Siri is purported to have will not be part of the system. So we will choose turn off Apple Intelligence, at which point you will see that the only controls you have for Siri are the main controls, like actually using Siri in the first place, being able to access Siri via the keyboard shortcut if Siri will listen out loud for you to communicate with it, and the voice that you can choose for it At any time. If you decide you'd like to turn back on those Apple Intelligence controls, you simply need to head into your system settings, choose Apple Intelligence and turn those on from there. So what we're going to do now is we are going to close out of this and we are going to head to the iPhone.

So here we are on the iPhone, running the latest version of iOS, and the way to turn off or disable Apple intelligence on this device is similar to what you would do on the Mac we head into settings, we go to the main settings page and scroll down until we find Apple intelligence and Siri, we tap on that and once again at the top we'll see Apple Intelligence. Now I want you to pay attention to something, because there's one setting here that's going to change when we turn off Apple Intelligence Right now on screen, under Siri requests, you will see a section marked Talk and Type to Siri. When I turn off Apple Intelligence, I get that same prompt that I saw on Mac OS to basically say, yes, I do want to turn off Apple intelligence, and when I do, talk to Siri is the only option that presents itself to me. Talk and type to Siri is an Apple intelligence feature for the most part, and so if you want to re-enable the ability to turn on, or rather to actually type whenever you're communicating with Siri, then you'll need to use an accessibility preference instead of just using the Apple intelligence features. Now, if at any time I want to turn this back on, toggling it on causes the device to re-download the Apple intelligence on-device models, and so that will take time, and you will likely see a prompt that says, as this does, downloading support for Apple Intelligence, connect iPhone to Wi-Fi and power while models are downloading, and that is actually going to re-download those models to the device and give the phone the ability to do much of what it does directly on the device.

Now let's take a look at how this works on iPad. As you might imagine, the process is pretty similar. We launch the settings app and we look for Apple Intelligence and Siri and we simply toggle off Apple Intelligence, we'll get another prompt turn off Apple Intelligence, at which point it switches off and that talk to or type to Siri setting changes to just talk to Siri. That's kind of another way to kind of confirm that it actually has changed. Now, if we tap this again, we're saying no, actually I want to use Apple Intelligence At that point.

If Apple has removed, if the OS rather has removed the on-device models, then those will need to be redownloaded. Removing those models will, of course, give you some space, some storage space that you can save, can sometimes kind of re -trigger what the settings look like, including the talk to Siri option, which, of course, if it is fully downloaded and Apple intelligence is fully enabled, we'll have that and type to Siri option. So if we head back over to iOS now, I can see that talk and type to Siri are shown up and that gives me the ability to double tap the bottom edge of the iPhone to actually type out a message instead of communicating out loud with Siri. So that is how you disable Apple intelligence on the iPhone and on the iPad. So that is how you turn off the Apple intelligence features that have been decidedly turned on for you, if at any time.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Hands on Mac. I'll be back next week with another episode, but until then, I hope you have a great day night, whatever it happens to be, wherever you are, whenever you're listening to this. Thanks, bye-bye.

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