Apple Intelligence gobbles 15GB of iPhone storage, and there’s no easy way to reclaim it

iPhone users are finding that Apple Intelligence occupies a surprisingly large amount of local storage on iOS 27, even when they don’t use the feature, or can’t yet access it. There’s no obvious way to get the space back, and irked owners are turning to Reddit for hacks, which seem to work.

For one user, it is 16GB. For another, it is 15.3GB. Others report lesser amounts of 9 or 13GB.

A cry for help is trending on Reddit – how to reclaim storage space taken up by Apple intelligence on iOS 27. The space can’t be used for anything else, and for many users, it appears to be more valuable than AI.

“Before updating to IOS 27, I had 25GB free space. Now 5.6GB. I have nothing more to delete on my phone. Apple, what are you doing?” one of the many Redditors shared.

Apple Intelligence is taking up a chunk of space even when it is not enabled or available, e.g., in the EU.

“I’m in the EU, AI Siri is not legal here, it still takes up 15.3 GBs,” another user said.

In parallel, Apple has been further upsetting the users by showing persistent ads urging them to activate iCloud storage or other products.

I checked my personal iPhone 15 Pro Max, where Siri and Apple Intelligence were always turned off. The device still reported 11.59GB of storage used by Apple intelligence. The entire iOS system accounted for more than 10% of the total storage on the 256GB model.

“Imagine having the iPhone 16 with 128GB storage, and 32% of it is allocated to the OS, AI, and a reserved auto update,” one of the Reddit users shared their napkin math.

“That’s me,” another one responded.

Simply disabling Siri or Apple Intelligence doesn’t reclaim the space, but Redditors have been sharing several “hacks” that seem to work, at least partially.

So what can be done?

A recurring workaround is changing Siri’s language to an unsupported variant. According to Apple, Siri AI is not available in the EU, won’t work in China, and is currently available only when both the device and Siri language are set to English.

Redditors suggest selecting UK, Canadian, Irish, or New Zealand English for Siri and/or device region, which reportedly significantly reduces the AI’s footprint. For one user, changing Siri’s language to UK English decreased the space needed for AI to just 126MB.

Users are warned against changing the Apple Account (ID) country or region, as this may require canceling subscriptions and using up the remaining Apple Account balance.

Other advice includes turning off any AI features across all settings, including Privacy and Security, mail, messages, notifications, summaries, and reports.

Following this advice, I changed Siri’s language to Dutch. This didn’t immediately change storage usage, but after the device reboot, it decreased from 11.59GB to 5.03GB – still less than optimal, but an improvement nonetheless.

The situation resembles the controversial Apple free U2 album release in 2014, when many iTunes customers were unhappy that the album was added to their libraries and automatically downloaded without their consent.

Ads pressure users into subscriptions

At the same time, Apple users are complaining about setting app notifications for promotional subscriptions. In a parallel Reddit thread, users complain that the “ads” can’t be dismissed unless accepted. They appear on the Settings app’s icon, as well as in the Settings near the top

TechRadar reports that Apple, “infuriatingly for iOS users”, promotes several of its products to the user, including iCloud+ storage, free trials for services like Apple Music and Apple TV, and the AppleCare+ extended warranty.