Author: [email protected] (Chip Loder)

To use Siri on macOS, there’s a requirement to send Apple your contacts. Here’s how to avoid handing that data over to Apple. If you have enabled Siri in System Settings in macOS, you may have noticed an alert that warns you turning Siri on will result in macOS sending your contacts, location, and voice data to Apple. This is a ridiculous requirement by Apple, and in fact it flies in the face of Apple’s claims of respecting user privacy. For obvious reasons, you might not want all your contacts sent to Apple. Nonetheless, if you want to use Siri in macOS Sequoia…

The macOS installer is quick and easy to use, but you can find out more info on what happens during installations by checking its built-in logs. Here’s how to look at them. macOS installer files are called Packages and usually have a file extension of .pkg. When you open a .pkg to install software on your Mac, Apple’s installer app performs a complex series of steps to verify and install the software. Most .pkg files are built to contain a series of standard steps in which the package is first verified, then payloads are decompressed and copied to the target…

In macOS Sequoia you can turn off AI-enabled searches. Search and Spotlight use Apple Intelligence in macOS Sequoia to suggest results to user queries. Here’s how to turn it off. With the release of macOS Sequoia 15.3 and iOS 18, Apple added a number of new Apple Intelligence features to both operating systems. In macOS, Apple Intelligence can now interact with both Search and Siri, as well as with ChatGPT (which gets installed as an extension if you enable it). For various reasons, you might not want to use Apple Intelligence in your searches and requests to Siri. Apple Intelligence is now integrated in…