Apple put iOS 27 out on 14 September with Siri AI as the headline, and within a week the Reddit thread that mattered was not about Siri at all. It was about storage. People who installed the update are finding that Apple Intelligence has taken somewhere between 9GB and 16GB of their iPhone, and the space does not come back when they switch the feature off. Apple’s own support document says the newest iPhones need up to 14GB free for the full set of AI features, up from 8GB, and older models up to 8GB, so the numbers people are seeing are not a bug. They are the design.
One Reddit user wrote that they had 25GB free before the update and 5.6GB after it, with nothing left on the phone to delete. Cybernews, which tracked the complaints, found a 256GB phone still reporting 11.59GB taken by Apple Intelligence after the owner had disabled it, with the whole iOS system then accounting for more than a tenth of the drive.
It Takes The Space Even Where You Cannot Use It
Apple Intelligence is not available in the EU, and it does not work in China, and Siri AI only runs when both the device language and the Siri language are set to a supported English. None of that stops the download. iPhone owners in Brussels and Berlin who cannot open a single AI feature are reporting the same missing gigabytes as users in Texas, which is the part people are angriest about.
A 128GB iPhone 16 comes off worst, with some owners seeing roughly 30% of the phone taken by iOS, the AI models and the storage Apple reserves for future updates before a single photo or app goes on.
Switching Off Siri Does Not Free It
The obvious fixes do nothing. Toggling Apple Intelligence off in Settings leaves the models on the phone. Turning Siri off altogether leaves them there too. Changing your Apple Account region would work, since the models only download for supported regions, but Apple makes you cancel subscriptions and spend any remaining balance before a region change goes through, so for most people it costs more than the space is worth.
The Fix Is To Set Siri To An English Apple Does Not Support
Change Siri’s language to a variant of English that Siri AI does not support on iPhone, then restart the phone, and Apple Intelligence drops from gigabytes to about 100MB. The models are only fetched when Siri is set to a supported locale, so pointing it at Canadian, Irish, South African or New Zealand English stops the download and clears what is already there after a reboot.
The steps on a phone:
- Settings, then Apple Intelligence & Siri
- Language, then pick English (South Africa) or one of the others above
- Restart the phone
- Settings, General, iPhone Storage, and check the Apple Intelligence line
We tried South African English on an iPhone running iOS 27.2 and the Apple Intelligence entry went from several gigabytes to just over 100MB after the restart. Siri still answers in English and still sets timers, sends messages and reads notifications. What you lose is Siri AI itself, the new assistant, because it will not run on an unsupported locale. If you were not using it, or could not, that is a fair trade for 15GB.
Apple has not commented on the reports. What it has done, according to Cybernews, is push harder on iCloud storage, with prompts urging users to subscribe and back up their data appearing more often since the update, and some of those prompts cannot be dismissed.
