Fed Up With Apple’s AI, Some Mac Owners Are Deleting It Themselves

Mac owners have reacted to RemoveMacAI with cheers and caution in equal measure, as Tech Times UK previously reported, after macOS 27 removed Apple Intelligence's single off switch.

Beyond the tool itself, the online reaction reveals at least three overlapping strands, users who want Apple's on-device AI gone, users who do not trust an unfamiliar script to remove it, and users whose immediate complaint is about storage consumption, whether or not they object to Apple Intelligence itself.

Plenty of Users Are Cheering the Removal

The developer's original Reddit post, which Tech Times UK covered in detail, had gathered over 1,200 upvotes at the time of writing, along with a long comment thread. 'Much needed, thank you,' wrote one commenter, with others saying they planned to use it on Macs with limited storage.

A more pointed reaction also surfaced. 'I hatttte that Apple has come to this, hopefully this kinda of blow back on their absolute dog s**t AI push,' wrote one user, a comment that had drawn 13 upvotes in the same thread.

The developer, known on GitHub as Om Lahore, has described the motivation in similar terms: even with every feature switched off, the foundation models stay on disk at around 12GB, which is what prompted the tool in the first place. Independent measurements elsewhere have found Apple Intelligence's storage use can run considerably higher than that figure on some machines.

Others Do Not Trust the Fix

A second wave of discussion complicated that picture. 'I don't want AI, I'm also not about to start running random "utilities" to get 12GB back,' wrote one commenter in a reply that had itself gathered around 97 upvotes.

On Hacker News, where the submission drew hundreds of comments, the debate centred less on Apple's AI and more on whether a curl | bash installer should be trusted at all. One commenter asked why the project needed to be a standalone application rather than simply distributing a configuration profile.

A related worry, raised separately on Reddit, is that a downloaded binary cannot easily be confirmed to match the public source code unless a user compiles it themselves.

The project's current release process does include SHA-256 checksum verification and GitHub build-provenance attestations, which addresses part of that concern without resolving the broader, standard software-supply-chain question of trusting any third-party installer.

Technical Users Weigh In on Reddit

The reaction on the subreddit r/macsysadmin, a community of IT administrators rather than everyday consumers, read differently again. One widely read post there set out the configuration keys and Apple's asset service in detail, explaining how the removal mechanism works rather than simply whether to use it.

That post also noted that some of Apple's older Apple Intelligence restriction keys were deprecated as Apple moved toward newer, declarative configuration controls, with the newer restrictions requiring a supervised Mac.

This is the same compatibility risk Tech Times UK's earlier coverage flagged, also reflected here in technical discussion among administrators examining the mechanism directly.

That a technical community engaged with the implementation at all, rather than just the headline claim, is itself a signal the project attracted more than casual attention.

A Simpler Complaint: Stop Using My Storage

The story also reached r/technology, a far larger and more general subreddit than the Mac-specific communities above. One user there asked whether Apple Intelligence models were only supposed to download once a feature was switched on, after finding more than 20GB attributed to Apple Intelligence despite having the relevant features disabled.

One of the more pointed replies put it bluntly: 'If these companies want to start storing their f**king software on my device, then I'm gonna need them to start paying me rent.' The remark, and others in the same thread, link the storage objection directly to the AI being unwanted in the first place, so this strand is closer to overlapping with the first two than a fully separate complaint.

A Wider, Older Complaint About 'Mandatory' AI

A third Reddit thread pushed the framing further still. 'Says a lot that we've reached the point where we need 3rd party tools and scripts to unshitify macOS, just like Windows,' wrote one user, in a comment that had gathered 94 upvotes. Another reply in the same thread was blunter still: 'AI eventually ruins everything, even Mac.'

One reply noted the irony that RemoveMacAI was itself partly built with AI assistance, a detail several commenters found amusing rather than damning.

A separate Reddit thread titled 'Dear Apple, you need to bring back the ability to disable Apple Intelligence' had gathered 358 upvotes of its own. It reads as independent of RemoveMacAI specifically, a complaint about Apple's removed toggle rather than a reaction to the tool.

What the Numbers Suggest, and What They Do Not

RemoveMacAI's GitHub repository had drawn over 800 stars at the time of writing, and its open issues, including 'Can I get only Siri on?', show some users are actively trying to use the tool, not just discussing it.

A smaller signal came from Bluesky, where one post about the tool had gathered around 45 likes when it was indexed, considerably less reach than the Reddit and Hacker News threads, but evidence the story travelled beyond both.

None of this supports the broader claim that Mac users generally are fed up with Apple Intelligence. What the evidence does support is narrower: a vocal group wants the AI and its storage footprint gone.

Meanwhile, a separate, overlapping group of technically minded users is unwilling to solve that problem by running software they cannot fully verify, and a third group's complaint centres on storage consumption whether or not they object to the AI itself.