# Apple Intelligence

50 Hacker News commenters recommended Apple Intelligence and 239 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for on-device, privacy-focused AI, useful features like photo search and Siri queries, and a free local model for developers. Critics often cite hard-to-disable features and disk use.

## Why people recommend it

- Useful everyday features like photo search (5 comments): "Siri is pretty damn good now, with safe access the data I kinda wish could be accessed safely by an assistant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793367)) "Being able to search photos with queries like "show me photos of me and teeray" is pretty useful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222564)) "eliminates the tedious process of manually transferring event details from posters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352294))
- Privacy from running on-device (4 comments): "Apple's most interesting value proposition is running local inference with big privacy promises." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307953)) "imho mostly useless AI - to great praise for the positive privacy ramifications of on-device" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040407)) "Private Cloud Compute goes to great lengths to prove it can't violate your privacy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50084367))
- Free local model for developers (4 comments): "The exciting thing about Apple Intelligence is the prospect of writing apps with the assumption that it exists on everyone's computer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960907)) "I'm becoming more bullish on just using the free tokens we get from our apple devices." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196394)) "The native Apple Intelligence works well for smaller context windows and text only." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48435048))
- Easy to find and turn off (4 comments): "It hasn't nagged me once to turn it or Siri on, and it isn't mandatory." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747396)) "it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212096)) "I can turn off the latter and never see anything about it again" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47460695))

## What people warn about

- Hard to fully turn off (5 comments): "It's great that you can turn all this off but why is it tucked away in Screen Time of all places?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49792167)) "Apple's assumption seems to be that the only reason you'd want to turn the LLM features off as a consumer is that you're a parent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794291)) "were moved out of the global siri checkbox and enabled by default, and now require you to use screen time content restrictions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959201))
- Features delayed or unfinished (5 comments): "They did botch the launch by announcing the Apple Intelligence features before they are ready" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968566)) "revealing a platform still in its early stages rather than a finished product" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46015675)) "they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46591790))
- Takes large amount of disk space (4 comments): "Apple intelligence is listed as 29 GB in the Storage settings." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49789941)) "22.8G as quoted in the article is about 10% of the available space and it is something that cannot be offloaded to external disk." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801821)) "If they wanna fill roughly 10% of your usable space with stuff you don't really use, with option to remove, you'd be mad too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960832))
- Mostly gimmicky, lacks real automation (3 comments): "imho mostly useless AI - to great praise for the positive privacy ramifications of on-device" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040407)) "They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46894312)) "What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794614))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Apple Intelligence", https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-intelligence/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).