With the arrival of iOS 27, Apple was hoping to make up a lot of ground in the AI space, but the new and improved Apple Intelligence comes with a huge caveat. Users who have already updated their iPhones to iOS 27 report that Apple Intelligence took around 15GB of internal storage.
The exact amount of storage allocation varies from phone to phone – some see 16GB of their storage inaccessible after the update, others report as low as 9GB. Perhaps the more frustrating part is that Apple Intelligence takes up your storage even when you can’t use it in your region, like EU iPhone owners, for example. Here Apple Intelligence isn’t available, but iPhone users at the office still found a good chunk of their storage is missing after the update.
Older iPhones running on lower storage, like the iPhone 16, for example, have it even worse. Some 128GB units are seeing about 30% of their storage occupied by iOS and AI in addition to the reserved storage for updates.
Disabling Apple Intelligence or Siri altogether doesn’t seem to restore the space. Changing the region of your Apple Account isn’t recommended either since it may require canceling subscriptions or using up the remaining balance before migrating. Luckily, Reddit users have already come up with workarounds.
What we found to work is changing Siri’s language to an unsupported variant. Technically, AI and Siri only work when the device and Siri’s languages are set to US or UK English. But in case you still want to make use of Siri in English, try selecting Canadian, Irish, South African or New Zealand English for Siri. That maneuver doesn’t eliminate the issue altogether, but it reduces Apple Intelligence to far more palatable levels of around 100MB.
Default state • Siri in South African English • No AI on local storage
We also tried South African English on our Siri, and it fixed the issue after a reboot.
Coincidentally, Apple has started pushing more aggressive ads for its iCloud storage service, urging customers to subscribe and back up their data to iCloud.