Well because it could be an extra ~20GB which is not nothing if you have a 256GB disk.

By that logic why not fill the hard drive with OS data? This is a company mind you that still sells some laptops with a base configuration of 256GB, so 10-20GB isn't an insignificant amount to many users especially when it's taken by a feature they may not even use.

It's 14GB of something I don't want, need, nor have any use for, on a machine that is notorious for making storage upgrades difficult.

because some people don't want AI and would rather even the files were not present in their computer.

I do want (some, carefully curated as to certain usecases) AI. But I don't want to waste my diskspace for this AI.

Friendly reminder:

Many apps (like dictation apps) ship with their own models totally separate from Apple Intelligence.

For example, Co-Typist [1] is very useful, but it requires a model installed with it, ranging from Gemma 3 1B at 0.8 GB to Gemma 4 26B A4B Pro at 15.7 GB. It recommended Gemma E2B (3.2 GB) for my 16 GB, M1 Pro MacBook Pro.

It works really well; the autocompletion is so good, it knows what I'm going to type before I do!

Here's the thing: you may not be aware of the amount of storage being used by models in various 3rd-party apps.

The open-source app What The Model [2] scans your machine and reports all the models it finds and gives you the total amount of storage being used.

[1]: https://cotypist.app

[2]: https://github.com/powtac/wtm