Apple Once Again Displaying Apple Intelligence Storage Space Info in Latest macOS 15.4 Beta
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When Apple released the second beta of macOS Sequoia 15.4 earlier this month, we found that macOS System Settings had been changed to hide the amount of local drive space taken up by Apple Intelligence.
When the change was discovered, some observers believed Apple made the move to hide the size of Apple Intelligence. However, as I first reported on Mactrast, with the release of the fourth macOS Sequoia 15.4 beta released on Monday, the Apple Intelligence storage space consumption is once again available for viewing.
To view the amount of storage space taken up by Apple Intelligence, do the following:
- Click on the Apple icon found in the upper left-hand corner of the Mac desktop.
- In the pull-down menu that appears, click on System Settings…
- When the System Settings dialog box appears, click on General in the left-hand menu.
- In the Storage menu, which will display on the right-hand menu, click Storage.
- Click the info button (an “i” with a circle around it) next to the macOS item in the Storage menu.
- A popup will appear that shows the version of macOS installed and the amount of storage space taken up by Apple Intelligence. (This is the same way System Settings displays the information in the current release version of macOS Sequoia 15.3.2.)
Apple hasn’t commented on whether the disappearance of the Apple Intelligence storage information was intentional, although it was likely missing due to a bug. While users that had System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled continued to be able to view the information, the Apple Intelligence storage numbers were unavailable to anyone with SIP enabled on their Mac.
However, many folks likely didn’t find themselves in this situation. SIP protects your Mac’s system by preventing unauthorized code from being run, and it can only be disabled by entering Recovery Mode. While disabling SIP is handy for developers testing their apps, disabling the feature is not recommended for most users, and few are likely to jump through the extra hoops to do it anyway.
While Apple says that Apple Intelligence can consume as much as 7 GB of storage space on a Mac, it appears to take up more space than on some Macs with the release of the fourth beta of macOS Sequoia 15.4 (Apple Intelligence shows as taking up 11.07 GB of storage space on my M4 Mac mini, and 10.58 GB on another M4 Pro MacBook Pro). Apple Intelligence requires dedicated storage space on your Mac’s storage device because it downloads machine learning models and assets, which allow some AI functions to run locally on the Mac. You cannot regain the disk space taken up by the feature without disabling it.
In addition to the return of the Apple Intelligence space consumption viewing being reinstated, macOS 15.4 also brings Mail Categorization to the Mac for the first time, and the Mail app is now organized into dedicated categories, including primary, updates, promotions, and transactions. A new range of emoji are also now available on the Mac.
Apple News+ subscribers can now enjoy a dedicated News+ Food section, which includes recipes, as well as news articles about restaurants and other food-related content.
A new Sketch style is available in Image Playground, as is the option to create Memory Movies in the Photos app.
Apple Intelligence is currently available in English (Australia), English (Canada), English (Ireland), English (New Zealand), English (South Africa), English (UK), and English (US) in most regions around the world. An April software update will deliver expanded language support, with more languages coming throughout the year. Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and other languages will be supported.
