Apple Intelligence on Your Mac:
What It Is, and How to Turn It On or Off

Nobody asked you first

That's the part that bothers people, and I think it's a fair thing to be bothered by. One day your Mac installed macOS Tahoe, and afterward your text messages arrived squashed into one-line summaries, Siri had a new glow, and right-clicking a sentence offered to rewrite it for you. No explanation. No orientation. Just new behavior in software you'd used the same way for years.

So let's take it apart calmly. Apple Intelligence is a bundle of AI features built into macOS — free, optional, and entirely reversible. Some of it is genuinely good (searching your photos by describing them is a small miracle). Some of it is half-finished. One piece of it — the notification summaries — is the single thing I turn off most often on other people's Macs. You get to decide which parts stay. This page shows you where every switch lives.

First: can your Mac even run it?

1. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner, then About This Mac.
2. Look at the Chip line. If it says Apple M1, M2, M3, M4 or later, you're eligible.
3. If it says Intel Core, Apple Intelligence will never come to that Mac. No update will add it — it's a hardware limit, not a settings problem.
4. Check the macOS version on the same screen. Apple Intelligence needs macOS Sequoia 15.1 or later; the current feature set arrived with macOS Tahoe 26.
5. You also need about 7 GB of free storage for the models it downloads, and your Mac's language and Siri's language have to match.

Turning Apple Intelligence off — the one switch

1. Open System Settings (Apple menu → System Settings).
2. Click Apple Intelligence & Siri in the sidebar.
3. Click the button next to Apple Intelligence so it's off. That's the whole job.
4. Writing Tools, summaries, Image Playground, Genmoji — all of it disappears from the menus, and Apple removes the downloaded models, giving you back roughly 7 GB.
5. Nothing else breaks. Your Mac works exactly as it did before, and you can switch it back on any time you like.

Or keep it and turn off just the annoying part

Most of the complaints I hear are about one feature: notification summaries, which squash a stack of messages into a single line that is sometimes confidently wrong. You can switch off just that. Go to System Settings → Notifications, click “Summarize notifications,” and turn it off. To be pickier, go back to Notifications, click an individual app under Application Notifications, and turn summaries off for that one app only. Apple itself had to pull these summaries for news apps for a while in 2025 after they garbled headlines, and brought them back with a warning that summaries may contain errors — which tells you how much weight to give them.

Writing Tools: the part that's actually worth having

• Select the text you wrote — a sentence, a paragraph, a whole email.
• Control-click the selection and choose Show Writing Tools. In Mail and Notes you can also hover over the selection and click the Writing Tools button.
• Proofread finds spelling and grammar mistakes and suggests fixes. This is the one I'd actually use.
• Rewrite redoes your text in a Friendly, Professional, or Concise tone — or type your own instruction under “Describe your change.”
• Summary, Key Points, List and Table reorganize longer text.
• Nothing changes until you accept it. My honest advice: use Proofread, skip Rewrite. Rewrite sands your personality off and hands back something that reads like a press release.

Where your words actually go

This is the question I get asked most. Apple Intelligence handles the bulk of requests entirely on your Mac — nothing leaves the house. For harder requests it uses Apple's own servers, a system called Private Cloud Compute, where Apple says only the data relevant to that one request is sent, it is never stored, it is not accessible to Apple, and independent privacy researchers can inspect the server code to verify that promise. You can see your own record of it: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Intelligence Report, choose 15 minutes or 7 days, then Export Activity. Separately, ChatGPT is not part of Apple Intelligence — it's a different company's service, off unless you switch it on, and it asks before sharing anything.

Is it useful yet? My honest scorecard

• Keep — Photos search in plain words. Type “dog in snow” or “birthday cake with candles.” For anyone with twenty years of unsorted photos, this alone justifies leaving it on.
• Keep — Writing Tools Proofread. Catches the typo in the email to the insurance company and leaves your voice alone.
• Keep — Notes transcription summaries. Record a doctor's appointment (with permission) and get a written summary afterward. Underrated.
• Keep — Clean Up in Photos and Type to Siri. Both do a simple job well.
• Careful — Mail summaries and priority. Open the real email for anything with a date, a dollar figure, or a medical instruction.
• Turn off — notification summaries. Highest annoyance, lowest payoff.
• Not here yet — the “personal” Siri. The version Apple demonstrated, that knows your email and acts across apps, is still unreleased. Apple's own words: still in development.

The Apple Intelligence scams to know about

• “Your Apple Intelligence subscription is expiring.” There is no subscription. It's free. Delete the email.
• “Download this to activate Apple Intelligence.” It's already inside macOS. Anything you're asked to download is malware.
• A pop-up demanding a “compatibility patch.” Real macOS updates come only from System Settings → General → Software Update. Never from a web page.
• A caller “from Apple” offering to set it up remotely. Apple doesn't call you. Hang up — caller ID can be faked.
• And one real change: AI wrote the typos out of scam emails, so bad spelling is no longer the tell. Judge the request, not the grammar. Voices can be copied too — if a “grandchild” calls needing money, hang up and call them back on their real number.

What's in the 27-page PDF

• Apple Intelligence in plain English — what it is, and the three things it isn't
• The 60-second version: everything that matters in six checkboxes
• Can your Mac run it? The ten-second check, plus the full requirements table
• Turning it on — and why nothing seems to happen for the first hour
• Turning it off — all of it, or just the parts that bother you
• Writing Tools: Proofread, Rewrite, Summary, Key Points, List and Table
• Notification summaries — why I turn these off, and exactly where
• What actually changed about Siri, and what's still not shipped
• Mail, Messages, Photos, Image Playground and Genmoji, one at a time
• Privacy: on-device processing, Private Cloud Compute, and your own activity report
• The optional ChatGPT piece — what's shared, and what isn't
• My honest feature-by-feature verdict, the AI scam page, a settings checklist, FAQs, glossary and a fill-in cheat sheet

Why I wrote this

I get asked about this at almost every visit now, and the question is usually some version of “is this thing helping me, or is it reading my mail?” That deserves a straight answer rather than a brochure, so I wrote one. I don't think Apple Intelligence is a revolution and I don't think it's a threat — I think it's version one of something with a few genuinely good ideas, a couple of half-finished ones, and one that mostly just annoys people. Keep the good parts, switch off the rest, and check back in a year. That's the whole guide, and I print it as a handout because the switches are easier to find when they're written down. — Bill