The Off Switch That Wasn't: macOS 27 Re-Enables Apple Intelligence and Won't Let Go

There is a particular genre of tech story that starts with a timestamp. On September 22, 2026, UK web developer David Bushell published a blog post titled “I said no and Apple said yes,” and it opens with one: at precisely 9:51am on Wednesday, February 5, 2025, he discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. He said no. He found the setting, and he turned it off.

Last week, Bushell upgraded from macOS 15 to macOS 27 “Golden Gate” — the release that shipped September 14 alongside iOS 27 and the rebuilt Siri AI. This week he went looking for the off switch he had used twenty months earlier. It isn’t there. Apple, he discovered, had removed the “no.”

What macOS 27 actually does

The specifics in Bushell’s post are what pushed it past 200 points on Hacker News within hours, alongside two adjacent threads — a 324-point, 200-comment discussion of Apple’s own support documentation and a 146-point “Ask HN: Is it impossible to disable Siri on macOS 27?” — that corroborate the same pattern:

• Silent re-enablement. All of the Apple Intelligence functionality was switched back on after the macOS 27 upgrade, despite “Apple Intelligence & Siri” being explicitly off beforehand. As Bushell puts it: “That was a rather explicit ‘no’, no?”
• The master toggle is gone. Where macOS 15 offered a (buried, two-part) setting to disable Apple Intelligence, macOS 27’s Siri control no longer carries the Apple Intelligence name or the kill switch. Commenters on Hacker News confirm the same regression on iOS 27: what could be disabled from one place in iOS 26 now cannot.
• Unkillable processes. After turning off Siri “again,” Bushell reports “multiple unkillable Siri processes remain, stealing memory and writing data.” The Ask HN thread backs this up in detail: the original poster disabled Siri in Settings, then in Screen Time, then manually ran launchctl bootout and launchctl disable against every Siri- and Apple Intelligence-related service — and the “Siri AI.app” process still came back after restart. The app bundle itself is read-only and cannot be removed without booting into Recovery and mounting the system partition read-write.
• A 22.28 GB brick. Apple Intelligence’s on-device models occupy 22.28 GB of Bushell’s disk. He does the math on Apple’s own storage pricing — £500 per terabyte on new MacBooks — and lands on roughly £11 of capacity consumed against his will. iPhone owners report the same phenomenon at smaller scale: one Hacker News commenter notes ~13 GB rendered unusable even with Apple Intelligence off.
• The escape hatch is a parental control. The only sanctioned path left is System Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions, which is designed for parents managing children’s devices. It doesn’t disable Apple Intelligence — it hides menus and swaps Siri to a “Siri Classic” mode that strips the AI-backed behavior. And it carries collateral damage: a Reddit report circulating in the threads says using Content Restrictions to suppress the features disables CarPlay entirely.

Apple’s support article, “Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac,” now documents the Screen Time route as the official method. That a support doc needs to exist at all — and that its Hacker News discussion attracted 324 points in under a day — is the story.

“Just turn it off”

The reason this particular case landed is that it weaponizes the AI industry’s own favorite rebuttal. For two years, users uneasy about ambient AI features have been told some version of “if you don’t like it, just turn it off.” Bushell’s post ends on exactly that irony: “AI bros keep telling me ‘just turn it off’ and when I do they remove the choice.”

The comparison everyone in the threads reached for was Microsoft’s Recall — the Windows feature that silently screenshots everything and which provoked such a backlash that Microsoft delayed it, then made opt-in behavior a headline commitment. macOS 27’s Personal Context, which indexes messages, mail, and photos for on-device retrieval, sits in the same category of always-on personal telemetry. The difference is direction of travel: Recall walked back toward consent under pressure. Apple Intelligence, between macOS 15 and macOS 27, walked away from it.

There is a defensible engineering version of Apple’s side — on-device models are architected into the OS, the Neural Engine pipelines are shared, and a single switch arguably can’t cleanly excise a subsystem the platform now assumes. But “difficult to excise” and “impossible to decline” are different claims, and Apple has moved from the first to the second. When the only mechanism for refusal is a parental-control pane that doesn’t actually stop the processes, doesn’t reclaim the storage, and may break CarPlay, refusal has been redefined as a UI cosmetic.

The storage economy of forced AI

The 22.28 GB figure deserves its own attention. Base-model Macs ship with 256 or 512 GB; a mandatory 22 GB reservation is 4–9% of the disk before the user stores a single file. Apple sells storage at a premium — Bushell’s £500/TB math — which converts a product decision into a forced purchase. The community’s workaround makes the absurdity explicit: to reclaim the space, users on GitHub (the delete-apple-intelligence-macos scripts, referenced throughout the threads) must disable SIP — System Integrity Protection, the root-of-trust mechanism that exists to stop exactly this kind of tampering. One commenter recovered 16+ GB this way and summarized the trade: an optional feature whose removal requires turning off your Mac’s core security layer.

Consent as a system requirement

Bushell’s framing is blunt — “The AI industry is vile” — and his post is a personal polemic, not a lab report. But the underlying question it raises is now unavoidable for every platform vendor: if AI features are valuable, users will keep them; if they must be kept by removing the exit, what does that say about the value?

Regulators will read this file before users finish writing it. Siri AI is, by Apple’s own documentation, not initially available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS — meaning the forced-enablement experience is largely a US/UK-market phenomenon for now. Europe’s DMA regime has already forced Apple into region-specific behavior on defaults and browser engines; “consent to on-device AI” is the obvious next frontier. And in the US, where the FTC has spent two years policing dark patterns, an off switch that requires parental controls, breaks CarPlay, or demands disabled SIP to function is a fact pattern waiting for a complaint.

The quiet tragedy is that macOS 27’s Siri AI is, by most accounts, a genuinely good assistant. It didn’t need this. Every user who wanted it would have kept it. The decision that will be remembered from Golden Gate isn’t what the AI can do — it’s that when one developer said no, precisely and on the record, the answer that came back was yes.