Free Tool Strips Apple Intelligence From Macs and Frees Up 12GB

If you don’t use Apple Intelligence, macOS 27 now makes you keep paying for it in storage. A free open-source tool called RemoveMacAI strips Apple’s models from Macs, reclaiming about 12GB and sometimes more. That lands in the middle of a small but annoying change: Apple removed the old master switch, so users can no longer turn off Apple Intelligence entirely.

In macOS 27, you can only disable features one by one. The models behind them still stay on the drive, and MacRumors says the system automatically downloads those multi-gigabyte files with no way to stop it. RemoveMacAI, released on GitHub under the MIT license, is built for Macs with Apple silicon and tries to unwind that setup in three moves: it uses Apple’s own restriction keys, deletes the downloaded models through Apple’s model-management service, and blocks repeat downloads by redirecting them to a closed local port.

The point is not just to hide a toggle. According to the developer, the tool removes the foundation models plus the models used for image generation, Genmoji, spatial photos, Photos Clean Up and code completion in Xcode. That means a long list of Apple Intelligence features goes with it: Siri, including “Hey Siri,” Writing Tools, inline predictions, smart replies in Mail, summaries across Mail, Messages, Safari, Notes and notifications, plus Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, natural-language event creation in Calendar, the ChatGPT extension, and anything else leaning on Apple’s models.

Apple’s storage appetite comes from its own design choice. The company pushes on-device A.I. whenever it can, so the models have to live locally instead of sitting in the cloud. MacRumors says Apple also serves different models depending on hardware, and Apple itself says the features need up to 14GB on high-performance Macs and up to 8GB on others. But users on Reddit and Hacker News say the real footprint can climb past 20GB and even beyond 30GB. Apple hasn’t explained that gap.

RemoveMacAI is not a clean little preference pane, though. MacRumors says anyone using it is doing so at their own risk, and Apple could break the trick later by changing the configuration keys it depends on. Still, for people with small SSDs, the appeal is obvious: if you never wanted Apple’s on-device A.I. in the first place, why should it squat on your disk like a stubborn houseguest?