Exactly why does Apple need to do any model training/development? They are out here selling the shovels.
The Foundation models keep a surprisingly decent set of data available for fast filtering by a local LLM.
I’ve found a slower, second pass, is needed by Qwen to clean it up. (I am running on the new Mac Mini m5 pro 64gb.)
I’ve run my own tests using a date range, a short description of a red cedar planter box build I did last year, and a set of known correct photos.
There is some cool stuff you can do without sending your family’s pics up to any of the frontier model providers.
I switched to Gemma 4 instead.
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?
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.
There's a lot of Macs out there. I would be surprised if that's the common experience for users, however, I fully admit that my sample size is small.
And I totally hear you on the frustration for reports these days. I set my expectations to be that it's a tally mark in some database somewhere with the hope that enough tally marks means a human looks at it, but it's so disheartening when you've spent such a large amount of money on something.
I am right now using my M5, on low power mode on a flat surface and it's almost too hot to type on. I have Codex open, just idling, Firefox and Logseq.
All of the offending processes at the top of activity manager are currently system processes: duetexpertd, mediaanalysisd, MenuBarAgent, WindowServer, Spotlight Engine, Time Machine, etc. A lot of these deal with caches, files, indexes. I suspect the root problem is a shared internal philosophy which regards the owner of the machine as a second-class citizen to the system.
It is bewildering given that I do not want the majority of "features" this tangled mess is providing. Issues such as bad caches, misbehaving files or directories, etc. are likely not the culprit since I experience this on fresh OS installs across two MacBooks. In the sense that if it is those issues, it's a system issue which needs addressing, and not PEBCAK. I have Siri disabled, Time Machine off, iCloud off, all iPhone integrations I can adjust are off, etc. Yet these processes increasingly dominate my computer.
I do appreciate you engaging with me on this and I hope I haven't come across as confrontational.
> You’ve fucked with your settings and they all run fucked
No, I think what happened is you lack adequate reading comprehension and would rather not interpret comments in good faith and decided to jump the gun and chastise a fictional version of myself.
> No you just acknowledged it’s a fresh install that you have immediately put in a very non default state
No. I shouldn't need to explicitly spell this out. And if you're not sure, you can ask instead of coming in hot with off-base assumptions and attitude. You can rest assured that I know what I'm fucking doing, man. I know how to isolate behavior, eliminate possibilities and debug systems, it is literally my profession. Assume a lot less, please.
When I say I wiped my system, it obviously means to anyone competent that I observed my system after wiping it and before modifying anything substantial. You literally have no idea what my configuration is. What is "fucked with your settings" supposed to even mean? They are settings, my man. They are meant to be set. I know what each one does, and how it affects my system. My system is largely stock other than the user-level applications and environments I manage for work. If changing the theme or disabling iCloud/Siri is causing these problems then I'm going to throw my machine out the window and find a different profession. Come on, man.
That is a bold claim for someone complaining that their system doesn’t work. Look, I’m not apologizing for macOS but it does seem that they test the happy path these days and you either use it as they give it to you or it runs like ass. Like if you want a computer without Siri and without iCloud etc then get a Linux box.
There are people who are qualified to fuck about with their computer and there are people who aren’t and how you tell the difference is after they fucked about with it they don’t fucking complain about it not working. (Because either it’s working or they understand that they fucked it up and they are choosing the particular form of the fucked-upness because they got some benefit).
But somehow you are possessed of such inexhaustible and unwarranted confidence that you have not even noticed your claim is both nonsense and impossible, and furthermore you feel justified in serving this impossible nonsense with a side of condescension!
This is such an abject failure of reason and decorum that the only course of action to positively contribute that I can suggest to you is to not contribute at all, i.e., shut up.
> You don't know that for sure.
> all of the Macs out there run the same operating system,
Wrong. Lots of Mac users skipped the Liquid Glass OSes. I was one until I bought an M5 that came with it. In fact, I was two versions behind on my M1 because the one before Tahoe also offered nothing that I wanted.
> the same software.
This referring to third-party software (my interpretation) is also wrong. People have wildly different setups, at least among us nerds.
> This can't an issue of a defective Mac.
Again, you don't know that. But your comment later on about two models having said issue is concerning. That said, there's a high likelihood that you run the same software on each.
> I am right now using my M5, on low power mode on a flat surface and it's almost too hot to type on.
If that's the case, I begin to suspect that the physical sensitivity that you mentioned in a different comment is the source. If that's the case, I'm empathetic cause it'd really suck to have that reaction. I can only make my M1 hot enough to noticeably warm up (or get hot) when slamming the CPU / GPU. I would hate for it to feel that way to me during normal use and you have my genuine sympathy if that's your experience on a machine running at normal levels. And if that's it, then get an external kbd and mouse. Not an ideal solution, but it sounds like the best option. Not portable. I know. But I'm looking for solutions here and there may be some compromise needed.
I said the same operating system, not the same version of that operating system. Please make sure you're correctly reading my comment before criticizing it.
> This referring to third-party software (my interpretation) is also wrong. People have wildly different setups, at least among us nerds.
Your interpretation is wrong, I am talking about system software, this entire time I've been explicit that this is an Apple daemon and system software issue.
> Again, you don't know that. But your comment later on about two models having said issue is concerning.
Correct, I don't know anything at all 100%. What I do know is I have two laptops worth $10k between them which both have a ton of issues that others online have corroborated and which seem to be tied to 26 and 27 especially. And that these issues all trace back to several Apple daemons. I also am well aware of what 26 and 27 introduced, and can connect the dots. My theory is a solid theory until proven otherwise, but sure, if you want to be smart, literally anything is possible.
> That said, there's a high likelihood that you run the same software on each.
I have already stated in this thread that I have accounted for this extremely obvious possibility while debugging, and assuming I'm an idiot who has not considered this already is patronizing and unhelpful.
> If that's the case, I begin to suspect that the physical sensitivity that you mentioned in a different comment is the source
I hope you think I am capable of reading temperature gauges and differentiating between heat and any additional painful sensation on top before opening my mouth about this issue on a public forum. I also have a partner who I have asked to touch my machine plenty of times to gauge her reaction. I'm not saying these machines get mildly warm. I am saying they get hot.
> I can only make my M1 hot enough to noticeably warm up (or get hot) when slamming the CPU / GPU
Yes, and if you read my comments, you would know that my complaint is that this is exactly what multiple system processes are doing. You would also have seen that I already mentioned I use external peripherals but that I am also often on the go. It is hilarious to suggest that the compromise needs to come from my end when my extremely expensive workstation cannot even idle without sometimes getting warm or hot.
Personally I have seen the situation get massively worse since I entered the macOS ecosystem in '23. My machine is running hot right now on flat surface with a nearly 0 user-side load. It's a soup of system processes each taking 15-200% of my cores. I used to not have to mess with the fans at all. Now, I have to keep them on literally full blast via third-party software just to comfortably use my laptop even while simply browsing the web (and I have JS turned off by default).
So I feel silly even considering engaging the Feedback Assistant. My demands are for the ability to categorically disable these services. I do not use Time Machine at all, why is the backup service slamming my machine? I do not need any AI-enabled media features. I don't need document title suggestions. I don't need LLM-powered autocorrect at the cost of heat and performance degradation. I don't need Spotlight indexing. At all. I want it to be a calculator and app launch bar. Literally nothing else. I despise user filesystem indexers as a rule and do not require them to use my machine effectively. I do not use iCloud in ANY capacity, nor Siri. So why are duetexpertd and Siri constantly obliterating my cores and causing sudden performance degradation even while in Gaming mode? I have plenty of free space, so it's not a thrashing issue, either.
My feedback would be that literally half of these services are completely unnecessary to me and yet I cannot fully disable or even configure them. I know this feedback will be completely ignored by Apple, because they are in the business of dictating to me what to expect from my computer and not the other way around.
As for turning things off, it's a bad idea to sell a product you haven't tested, and it's also a bad idea to add settings that randomly break stuff because users will forget they changed those settings. So it's difficult.
[0] you can also become that person: https://careers.apple.com/en-us/details/200687840-0836/softw...
Plus one for this tool. I've been using it for about eight months or so. Useful for keeping Backblaze and other daemons from taking over when they're supposed to be invisible.
> Unfortunately, this does nothing for services such as WindowServer which now often takes up 50-100% of a core just on its own.
WindowServer can be a real dog (Finder, too, if opening lots of windows with videos that can be previewed in QuickLook). Closing all of the open windows is inconvenient, but it solves the issue until they get built up again and stay open for an extended period of time. I hope they address this in the future; we'll see how a new CEO prioritizes software quality. I'm the most hopeful that I've been in five or more years given the change in leadership. Doesn't mean it'll happen.
> 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.
That shouldn't happen on a machine built in 2023. Take it to an Apple Store (or third-party) and see if a repair tech agrees. I repaired laptops that overheated when I had that role. There was a debacle about thermal paste a decade and a half ago (maybe longer). If it's under AppleCare, you might be able to get it fixed at no extra charge. If not, I'm sorry that it'll cost money, but Apple offers a flat-rate repair for laptops. Maybe they'll say it's fine and it'll be frustrating, but it's worth exploring.
I appreciate your suggestion. I'm curious if the machines you repaired then had aluminum unibodies? My understanding is that if my chassis heats up quickly, then the thermal coupling is good, since the unibodies act as a heat sink. Certainly, blasting the fans at 100% typically makes it cold enough to use after just a couple minutes unless I'm actively pelting my cores. Very impressive cooling system. Unfortunately the default curves are terrible and I have to use third-party software to control the fans, but they do work well. Anytime a Rosetta application is running I usually have to blast the fans as well; Thunderbird alone makes the computer too warm to comfortably use. Thankfully, the benevolent overlords at Apple have decided to cut Rosetta support for 28.
The problem is these background services each taking up 50-200% CPU, and it being enough of them that at least one seems to usually be misbehaving. That means the machine is just running hot a lot more often during casual use. My M2 is under Apple Care but I plan to transition it to Asahi or Gravity soon and just live with the lack of proper SEP support on it for a year or two, and see if that clears up the thermal issues, since it was fine until I upgraded to 26.
The M5 is under Apple Care and I do plan to get around to taking it in. It's a daily driver for work so it's been difficult making time and I had some misplaced hope that Apple would correct this as 27 matured.
There's a really nasty bug in Golden Gate 27.0.1 which causes ANECompileService, mediaanalysisd, duetexpertd, and other apple intelligence-related features to thrash and permanently spike your CPU. I tested this yesterday on a machine with ~12GB of space left and the result was launchd writing 163 GB and ANECompilerService writing 70 GB in less than 24 hours. The noticeable effect is that the AI text-recognition for photos in QuickLook will not work and repeatedly download and compile ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/com.apple.e5rt.e5bundlecache items. One in particular repeatedly fails and downloads a 69.9 MB file with model.mil and weights1.bin inside of the package folder. This will happen every 6 minutes, which further compounds the severity of the issue since the bug itself is due to low disk space. This folder has risen to 2–5 GB for me before, which I had to just delete manually. The filenames are <HASH>.tmp.<number which increases every time>.<random>.bundle.
I figured this out by watching `$ log stream` and seeing what was happening, which was lack of disk space while ANECompilerService was compiling ai features after opening a file in Preview or in Quick Look in Finder.
I fixed this by freeing up ~10GB (bringing me up to 20GB) and deleting the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/com.apple.e5rt.e5bundlecache/. After rebooting, I left it on overnight to reindex everything.
I know a new phone or Mac bangs hard on indexing even pre-foundation models. I haven't set up a new device with 27, so I don't know how much that might have increased.
I also have as much indexing turned off on Spotlight as I can, and that is another issue. Spotlight seems to disrespect my settings and indexes/displays more than it should. Seems like an open, unaddressed bug. I've assumed this is related to the Spotlight-specific CPU usage issues I have but it doesn't explain the others.
Nothing about iCloud Photos is private.
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.
I assume customers were notified?
They make and sell the hardware that will actually make AI something everyone can used without needing to rely on OpenAI/Anthropic et al.
Apple has never had a moat, anyone else could have built this sort of hardware but they haven't.
So they don't care which model wins, because it will always move out to the edge of the network, and they own a large chunk of that edge.
Hint: money is not the only reason.
Jeez.
If you fortunate to get a job at any of the big tech companies today, quibbling about the pay package is the least of your worries.
Apples largest competitive advantage has always been and always will be - trust combined with epic marketing to make the vast majority of people aware of it.
Trust of quality, privacy w.r.t data etc.
I’m sorry but I’ve seen so many bad takes re. Apple over the years. Many of you think you are so smart on topics outside of your domain - but you’re not.
Lmao
> Many of you think you are so smart on topics outside of your domain
Turn the mirror around
They spent decades learning to eliminate a 1000 headaches for themselves, and many for their customers, by accumulating vertical integration:
The co-design of their own comms, processors, devices and OS variants. Their own integrated supply chain and sales channels.
The better the results, the more invisible or clock-like their delivery.
Very easy to overlook. But nobody can match them on their terms.
(Nintendo also applied a unique set of internal advantages to generations of successful devices: vertically integrating humble components, highly scoped software, a strong theory of fun, and deep branding with novel polished interfaces.)
Apple is the only company that actually listened to Alan Kay when he said if you care about software, build hardware.
They are the last company that’s vertical from the 1980s. Unfortunately, all the other companies (SGI, Sun, Digital etc..) died in the face of the Wintel colossus.
Marketing is irrelevant. If you don’t have something to sell that is actually any good see the Microsoft Surface fiasco and its lack of an impact in the marketplace.
I think both points are very incorrect. Apple has a massive moat. And Apple is making hardware (specifically, CPUs) that are two years ahead.
Unlike the "pure" AI players, who rely on NVIDIA and others, Apple is relying on its own capabilities, vertically organized, to maintain its lead in consumer space.
They are using the "cloud" to again, vertically integrated, to preserve their "privacy first" consumer marketing, their hardware to maintain their "premium product" lead, and they are usually second to a market after a first-mover advantage has been reduced by ongoing development.
Nvidia's own model does not have to beat OpenAI or any SOTA model. Nvidia just need to build up the in house expert and knowledge to make a better chip since hyperscalers and none hyperscaler like Meta is building their own AI chip now.
Apple can chose not to train their own model to learn how to sell a better shovel.
just wish their containerization / linux compat wasn't so nerfed. Just moved my homelab's inference engine over to a GB10 from a Mac MTP setup to have first class k8s support, as well as open up access to the broader CUDA ecosystem (cuOpt etc.).
They’ll likely embed text models more deeply in the future, but the history of “Apple Intelligence” doesn’t give a lot of hope that they’ll nail it.
So they’re not selling shovels (a precursor to making the thing) but products and services to use it.
By the way, the new Apple folding phone appears to be a hit. a real hit the last test left is whether or not it is as good as it appeared to have been in the demonstrations. only time will tell when it gets into the hands of the general public.
Nowadays they are basically the iDevices company, if macOS wasn't required for XCode, the worldwide sales would be much less.
I do have an interest in local, private inference though and I am willing to pay for that.
Apple segmenting the market is actually a good strategy. Horses for courses, as they say.
Yeah, sure, inside a closed-source OS communicating constantly to private servers on the internet. Sounds very private to me.