The UI isn't worse though, it's literally the same. It's just an additional option you have to be able to touch the screen. I routinely forget that my Framework 13 Pro even has a touch screen. I don't really care that it does because that functionality of the computer cost a single digit amount of dollars to include in the design.
I'll list out two immediate benefits with zero UI changes that macOS touch screen users will get:
iOS developers will be able to touch their apps in the simulator.
Pinch/zoom/centering photos will be highly intuitive for basically everyone because basically everyone has family photos and a photo library.
As I understand it, the point is that land rent is a large and stable rent, where taxing it has few supply-side side-effects, not that land rent is the only rent.
The second paragraph of the Georgism Wikipedia page mentions other rents,
> Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property).
I don’t understand why the sites I’ve already set up with TOTP are trying to force passkeys down my throat, using dark patterns to try to trick me into it, and making me click extra times just to log in!
Makes me think there is some sort of conspiracy, even if this is reasonably argued and seems true.
Wrong. 12GB is potentially 9.4% of your disk. At the very least, the original M1 MacBook Air (perhaps others) could be purchased with 128GB of storage.
“Siri” has existed for a long time, yes. Apple Intelligence, not so much. It really is just an arbitrary AI model, since I’ve had Siri for a decade and not needed whatever this extra 13GB model is.
You've had a previous version of Siri for a decade that didn't do what the current version of Siri does. Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified – it's what Siri needs to do what Apple wants it to do.
Siri didn’t always have a multiple gigabyte installation surface.
Sure, it doesn’t bother me that I can’t uninstall Siri or Apple News or Stocks on my Mac because those programs take up a trivial amount of space. I can just disable or remove them from the dock and move on with my life.
That’s not the case now that “Siri” is a double digit gigabyte installation, especially if you assume that my computer has 256GB of storage, which was almost certainly Apple’s most popular MacBook Air configuration within the last 5 years.
That is a new change where Apple is using 5% of my storage space for something I don’t even want to use.
My family was driving this road south from Ouray to Durango one morning when I was about 20. We got stuck in a traffic jam. Eventually we made it to the place where a car had gone over the edge the night before, and they were trying to winch it up about 1000 feet. Papers and belongings were scattered down the mountainside. It was very sad and sobering. Driving back that night in light rain was terrifying.
I know, I was making fun of it. It's a "'no way to solve this', says only country which hasn't solved it yet" kind of problem which exists solely due to American exceptionalism.
On one of my machines, I don’t know if I could even make it fit. So it’s a no-brainer to not update on that one, if they are going to force an extra 14GB download on me.
Perhaps eventually. I know I’m in a “closed ecosystem,” and that removes a fair bit of choice in a variety of places. But Apple is known to walk bad decisions back at times. This update is an example, with liquid glass. Another recent one was the iCloud private email planned domain change being scrapped.
Liquid Glass was rushed out because their flagship WWDC feature, Apple Intelligence, wasn’t ready as expected. They knew they didn’t finish refining Glass as they had intended to. They had unfinished work with Glass that got pushed to this year due to the last minute change in direction. The refinements we got weren’t only the product of feedback and they already intended to revisit the design.
This situation is a bit different where they’ve taken several years delay now to refine their AI strategy before releasing it.
If they let users permanently opt out of their AI rollouts this early on, their stock will plummet. They’re going to focus on making it better to drive adoption and value instead of letting people remove themselves from exposure to what they have in the pipeline.
I mean they added a slider to make Liquid Glass slightly less bad, but the “good” end is just the old “reduce transparency” option. They’ve got a lot of progress to make, if they are ever going to give us back the pre-liquid-glass UI density.
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.
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.
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