Hands-On Mac

Jan 23rd 2025

Hands-On Mac 166

Apple's New AI Clean Up Tool

Hosted by Mikah Sargent

Hit or Miss?

New episodes every Thursday.
Category: Help & How To

In this episode, Mikah Sargent explores Apple's new Clean Up feature, part of the Apple Intelligence suite, which aims to remove distractions from photos.

- Clean Up is a new feature in macOS Sequoia's Photos app that uses on-device machine learning to remove unwanted objects from images
- To use Clean Up, enter edit mode, select the Clean Up tab, and either click, brush, or circle the object to remove
- Mikah tests Clean Up on a photo of a puppy with a toy in the background; it successfully removes the toy but loses some pillow texture
- On a building photo, Clean Up struggles to properly remove a person, distorting the stairs
- Clean Up has difficulty fully removing an iPhone and keyboard from a spatial photo of Leo Laporte
- Apple's on-device approach to machine learning, driven by privacy, currently falls short of Google's server-side Magic Eraser feature
- Clean Up is available on all Apple devices that support Apple Intelligence features, including iOS and iPadOS

Want access to the video version and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

Links