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I've found some strange guardrails with the Foundation models. Like blocking describing of any photo with a single woman in it. It does this relatively consistently but with a different subset every time. Like out of 10 photos in the set, it's skips 6 then the next run, it skips 3. Have you seen guardrail issues like this?

I switched to Gemma 4 instead.

by blacksmith_tb5 hours ago|

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I am going to assume that means "a women by herself" and not that it can magically detect her marital status before refusing to continue (I suppose it could be laser-focused on wedding rings...)

by dominotw7 hours ago|

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same i am using new embeddinggemma. seems far more capable than foundation models.

by sneak5 hours ago|

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No. Apple’s Photos ecosystem uploads all Photos effectively unencrypted to Apple in a way that is readable by Apple, allowing Apple to do server-side analysis of all content. This content is also provided to US or Chinese federal authorities without due process or warrants.

Nothing about iCloud Photos is private.

by isomorphic5 hours ago|

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With Advanced Data Protection enabled (it's not available globally but it is in the US), Photos is E2EE.

by sneak12 minutes ago|

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Even with ADP on, it uploads the unique hashes of the PLAINTEXT of every photo to Apple, so they know who had what unique files, when, and who had them next, and when, etc. You can’t receive or transmit an original Winnie The Pooh meme between two phones with ADP on without Apple and the FBI knowing who had it first and when the second person received it.

Also insofar as ADP is off by default the whole system can NOT be said to be “privacy oriented”, which was the claim I was refuting.

Apple, for the most part, does not care about the privacy of their users. ADP would not be built today, and it will probably eventually be quietly removed (like it was in the UK), because ~nobody uses it.

by soulofmischief7 hours ago|

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I don't want any of these features and yet they've been forced upon me and are now getting in the way of me actually using my computer how I want. Games and heavy applications slow down and stutter because of "AI" background processes, even with App Tamer, my machine runs too hot to even touch when just idling. Compared to when I got my M2 in '23 and thought, "This is the fastest and snappiest machine I've ever used", my experience with an M5 and the latest macOS version is nothing short of an anti-consumer hellscape.

by doug_durham7 hours ago|

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My Macs run cool and silently. I've never observed a background "AI" process consuming resources.

by soulofmischief6 hours ago|

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It's not just AI processes. But things like mediaanalysisd, duetexpertd, etc. even the freaking menu bar agent, all regularly pound my computer both when idling and when in use.

I recently installed App Tamer which is helping a bit, but it doesn't allow me to tame everything. I just checked now and duetexpertd was trying to use nearly two full cores. I have all iCloud integrations turned off, I do not use iCloud at all, and I do not have an iPhone, so I am flabbergasted that this iCloud desktop-phone syncing process runs at such high core usage in the background with extreme regularity. Proof: https://imgur.com/VkBh9bi

Unfortunately, this does nothing for services such as WindowServer which now often takes up 50-100% of a core just on its own.

I have reinstalled and upgraded to the latest version. This MacBook is only a few months old.

While typing this message and literally just having open Codex with one running task that is not doing anything substantial, and Firefox, with no high CPU usage from any tab, my laptop got so hot that I had to use another installed program, Stats, to manually bump up the fan since macOS also has absolutely garbage native system fan controls.

I have fibromyalgia and seem to be sensitive to hot keys; my Thinkpad regularly getting to hot to touch with even light usage is EXACTLY why I went and bought a MacBook one morning in '23. One morning I touched my keyboard and realized I was tired of singeing the nerves on my fingertips and having them hurt for hours. So now in '26, finding myself in the same exact position but with a much more expensive computer, I feel like I am living in a corporate hellscape nightmare.

One thing I have noticed is all of my cores can sit idle except a single one and that will still heat up the machine a lot. If the hardware is designed as such, the software MUST be designed to work around this and not blast a core for 10 minutes straight every time one of a dozen or two misbehaving system processes wants to complete a background task. If the software is not designed for this, the hardware is incomplete and faulty. This would be true if it was shipped as firmware; software doesn't get a free pass here.

But now Pages and Numbers recommend document titles for me, so.... worth it?

by unsnap_biceps4 hours ago|

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this is not my experience at all. I wonder if one of your tweaks is causing the software to get into a bad state. Likely worth reporting to Apple even if it feels like it's going into a void.

by soulofmischief1 hours ago|

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Which tweaks? This is stock macOS 27 on a stock machine, with of course my development stack on top. I have already tried reinstalling the OS. Besides that, everything else has been configured appropriately in system settings and profiles using Ansible, so that I know exactly what configuration state my machine is in. There's nothing weird I am doing to the system processes other than now using App Tamer to prevent the processes from continuing to use multiple cores while I'm trying to use my machine.

I do feel like my complaints go to the void, and honestly I have seen the kind of responses people get on the Apple support forums and it gives me the same ick that Microsoft's does. And lately I'm just going to get someone's canned, patronizing LLM-generated resume-building response. My only hope out of this mess is Gravity Linux catching up and adding full SEP and thunderbolt support. Once that happens, I'm gone.

I do wonder about the prevalence of my experience vs yours. I can quickly find hundreds of threads across various platforms which confirm my experiences. From what I have been able to ascertain, my experience is increasingly common if not more common than yours. Hard to tell.

by papa_bear7 hours ago|

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Interesting, this has not been my experience at all. I have an M5 machine and I'm not even aware of what AI features have been added, and it's streets ahead of my old M1 Pro in speed.

by sneak5 hours ago|

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The M1 used to be adequate in speed. Then Apple kept adding always-on cloud daemons that run even if you don’t use iCloud.

by soulofmischief6 hours ago|

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peep the comment I just made to the adjacent commenter, that has been my experience. I basically have to run my fans at full speed all day while working now in order to type on my computer (when I'm not using my magic keyboard). It is like a huge problem, not even just a small one but like something that is affecting me negatively every single day, increasingly making me want to break this machine in half and disappear into the woods.