Keeping a blog means David Bushell can date this to the minute: 9:51am, Wednesday 5 February 2025, when he noticed macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that sent personal data to Apple every 15 minutes. He turned it off — Apple still provided a switch then, though the second half of the control was buried one level deeper, because saying no was not supposed to be easy.

Last week he upgraded macOS 15 to 27 (“I only skipped one major version, Apple skipped 10”) and found the switch gone.

  • The Apple Intelligence features came back on after the upgrade, on a machine where “Apple Intelligence & Siri” had already been switched off — “a rather explicit no, no?”
  • Turning Siri off again leaves processes behind: “multiple unkillable Siri processes remain, stealing memory and writing data. For what purpose? Who knows.” Apple also removed the Apple Intelligence entry from that control pane.
  • The one lever he could still find is hidden under Screen Time restrictions, the parental-controls panel. It does not disable anything; it hides the AI features from menus.
  • Disk: Apple Intelligence is occupying 22.28 GB on his machine. At Apple’s £500-per-terabyte upgrade pricing he prices that at “£11 they’ve stolen from me.”

His argument is that the cost is not the point — consent is:

The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it. You cannot look away, it will be stuffed down your throat and if you say “no” they’ll cut out your tongue.

The line that names the trick is shorter: “AI bros keep telling me just turn it off and when I do they remove the choice.” He lists three headlines he had collected that month — CSAM on X despite Musk’s pledges, more than 50 consumer-harm and wrongful-death suits against OpenAI, and OpenAI and Microsoft admitting LLMs are destroying the web — as the direction of travel. His own AI policy page, he says, is hopelessly out of date already, because he cannot keep up.

What the thread adds

The 271-comment thread on Hacker News is split between arguing about the claim and sharing ways to get the models off the machine.

  • Coeur — the correction that matters most. They say the “Apple Intelligence Report” duration setting (Off / 15 minutes / 7 days) is a transparency report you use to inspect what has been sent to Apple, not a frequency at which data is sent. On their reading the post’s opening claim — a feature “phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data” — is simply “not true.” Worth holding alongside the rest of the post, because the whole argument rests on that first discovery.
  • jackyard86 — a working disable recipe for iOS and iPadOS: set Siri’s region to a country where it is unsupported (they use Russia). They report it returns roughly 15 GB and removes things Screen Time cannot hide, such as Safari Reader’s oversized “summarize” button. haunter links a separate workaround thread on avoiding the model download in the first place.
  • meredithbloom — how they survive macOS upgrades: download the outbound firewall LuLu before the OS, install the OS while disconnected, and only re-enable WiFi once LuLu is running, so every outgoing connection can be reviewed and most of them denied.
  • imglorp — corroborates the leftover processes with receipts, pasting their ps output from macOS 26 with every toggle off: siriactionsd, SiriSuggestionsBookkeepingService, siriinferenced. baggachipz adds the practical absurdity — on a 256 GB MacBook Air there is not enough free space to upgrade the OS while the Siri bloat stays put.
  • hecifato — argues the global off switch has been replaced by partial blocking, that the Apple Intelligence parts of Photos cannot be blocked at all, and that iOS 27 still runs fine on a device that cannot run Apple Intelligence — evidence that none of it is load-bearing.
  • rozenmd — names the interface pattern: “You ever notice how Apple never really lets the user say ’no’? It’s always ‘maybe later’ and never ’no seriously, I don’t want this, go away’.” Phemist wrote a browser extension that hunts down those polite decline buttons and replaces them, and describes the pattern as abusive: “Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and ‘Maybe later/no, thank you’.”
  • throwaway2037 — the policy fix rather than the personal one: a legal right to refuse these features at setup and at update time. “This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!”
  • tacker2000 — the question aimed at the author: “Why does anyone who seems to be working in the software industry even think that immediately updating to the latest major release is ever a good idea?” Bushell had justified it in an earlier note; another commenter says they now wait a full year, and upgrade to the previous major release only.

Where the thread pushes back

  • The most common pushback is not against the complaint but against the conclusion. eur0pa: “I’m not completely against the technology, but please let me say ’no’ and remove the models and kill the processes.” That is the thread’s centre of gravity — grudging tolerance rather than rejection.
  • The Linux exit is offered and immediately stress-tested. vitro (15+ years on Linux) calls Mac and Windows “an ordeal… ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying,” and gets answers from tomp (Mac hardware is “lightyears ahead” of the alternatives), throw0101a (who runs both and finds macOS the less annoying daily driver), Levitating (desktop Linux is “still in a pretty bad state,” citing a broken Linux Mint upgrade and an hour of unexplained dkms heat) and Gareth321 (will not move his gaming PC while kernel-level anti-cheat is unsupported). Nobody in that subthread disagrees that the alternative costs work.
  • haute_cuisine reads the moment as a brand turn — “customers are starting to perceive it as hostile company” — while herrherrmann and asdff date the slide back years, to soldered RAM and the butterfly keyboard, long before AI.

The post is short and its evidence is one machine, but the shape of the complaint is what travelled: an opt-out that existed, then did not, on hardware the user owns. The thread’s most useful contribution is the reminder that the specific 15-minute claim is disputed — and that the countermeasures people actually use are region tricks, firewalls and browser extensions, none of which Apple is obliged to keep working.

On reading comments as evidence: HN handles are pseudonymous, the site publishes no per-comment scores, and the order here is HN’s own ranking rather than a vote. This is a slice of the thread, not a consensus.