Apple Intelligence stuck on "Preparing" status for more than 10 hours

It was still stuck on my Mac for more than 24 hours, and I contacted Apple Support this morning. I was told that nothing was wrong and that "it needs to understand your daily routine and usual activities, it needs a little bit of time to have the data documented in order for the responses/features to be relevant to your daily activities so it should be ready by tomorrow most likely".

Apple M1: Here’s a sequence of steps that worked for me:

1. Change the language from English to a different language.

2. Listen to one of the voices.

3. If your Siri is disabled, enable Siri requests. If it’s enabled, toggle it off and back on.

4. Change the language back to English and select one of the other voices.

5. Apple Intelligence is now activated!

If this doesn’t work, I also deleted Siri and Dictation history before attempting the steps above. I’m not sure if that had any effect.

I signed up for the beta, but it never got activated. Perhaps we have that in common?

For everyone here looking for answers, I stumbled onto a possible solution here.

First and foremost, as in my first suggestion, you must verify (establish) your connection to a WiFi network 🛜, not simply a mobile hotspot (my apologies for not being more precise in my first response).

If Apple Intelligence is stuck on your iPhone:

1. Open Settings ➢ General ➢ iPhone Storage.
2. Scroll to the bottom and tap ⚙️ iOS.
3. Apple Intelligence should be fully downloaded if it reads: 2.56 GB.

If Apple Intelligence is stuck on your Mac:

1. Open Settings ➢ General ➢ Storage.
2. Scroll to the bottom and double-click ⚙️ macOS.
3. Apple Intelligence should be fully downloaded if it reads: 4.94 GB.

Now, go directly to Settings ➢ Apple Intelligence & Siri and you should find the prompt or switch to toggle on Apple Intelligence.

Please provide any feedback if this has helped so we can all learn from this.

Good Luck! 👋🏼😉

Stu's approach worked for me. I was stuck on "Preparing" for three days. I verified that Apple Intelligence was downloaded under General -> Storage -> MacOS.

I noticed that the Language field in my Apple Intelligence & Siri setting was blank. When I selected English (United States), I received the following: "Settings Error, Extension process Siri exited."

I verified settings under General -> Language & Region. I have United States listed for the Region and English (US) - Primary listed for Preferred Languages. I tried rebooting several times, to no avail.

After reading Stu's post, I switched Siri Language to Mandarin - Taiwan (received the error that AI is not yet available, but at least did not get the Siri exited error). I was then able to switch language to English (United States) without the Siri error and was immediately notified that Apple Intelligence was ready to go.

I figured it out!!! I was troubleshooting for days about why apple intelligence wasn’t downloading. I realized that I always have battery saver on for macbook. So I connected to wifi as required, then TURNED OFF BATTERY SAVER, and boom, apple intelligence immediately finished and now I have apple intelligence! The whole time it was stuck in preparing because battery saver was turned on and I am guessing that in order to conserve battery it won’t do any major updates or downloads. The gentleman that used his Time Machine and reset his Mac to factory settings got me thinking. Yay!

I had the same issue… What worked for me was changing my phone language to US English, and then changing Siri language to US English too. I then I restarted, and once that was done I was able to turn Apple Intelligence on.

I figured out that if you have your battery saver on, apple intelligence won’t download. Many people were mentioning having to reset their MB to factory settings and it got me thinking and so I turned off battery saver, connected to WiFi and boom. Downloaded.

I ran into this issue when initially setting up an iPad Pro. It came with iPad os 18 and during the initial setup process it recommended upgrading to iPad os 18.1.1. After the update finished and the setup finished, the iPad would not finish installing Apple Intelligence and reported it was on the “preparing” stage for hours—even letting it sit overnight did not help. Eventually I guessed that something went sideways during the iPad os upgrade in the middle of the initial setup process so I erased the iPad and went through the setup process again knowing now it was running the iPad os 18.1.1 software. After the setup process was complete I was able to activate Apple Intelligence and it successfully downloaded and installed without stopping in the “preparing” phase. I hope this information helps someone.

Om my M2 MacBook Air it was stuck for over a couple of days at "Preparing". Rebooting several times over that time frame did nothing. What DID work was switching Siri Language to something else. I tried Cantonese. First it gave an error dialog with some number like -128 or something, then it switched to Cantonese but warned me that Apple Intelligence was not compatible with that language setting. I switched back to English and it worked!

Smilin-Brian wrote:

If it’s not fully downloaded, then wait until it is.

Listen, the download is restricted to a WiFi connection, that much is clear.

If your connection is poor, then restart the device or network.

Also (as others have pointed out), be sure that the region is set to the United States and language is set to English U.S.

It is not required or even necessary to set the region to the US. It IS necessary to set the language and Siri language to US English.

It is now working after some minor download of some features for Siri. What I did is switch to other language region and back to US. Then it is ok. Make sure your internet connection is ok.

I fixed the "Preparing" problem on my M1 Mac!!

After three days of waiting, I changed the language for Siri to New Zealand and then back to American(United States). Apple Intelligence was immediately available after that. Clearly a bug on Apple's part but an easy fix.

Most likely a carrier restriction. I had the same issue and once I got on a stable WiFi network and reset all of my settings to refresh the Apple Intelligence download it downloaded immediately and began to work.

I had the same problem with my Mac mini m2. My MacBook Air m2, iPhone 15 pro and iPad Air 5 already had Apple Intelligence working quickly after joining the waitlist.

I have tried the following:

Check if all the necessary settings are correct, Mac and Siri Language set to US English and Region set to United State.(After you've enabled you can change the region again to your own country.)

I made a Time Machine backup of the current state of my Mac mini.

After that, I completely uninstalled macOS.

Installed the version of macOS that came with my Mac mini out of the box.(through recovery mode)

Set it up as a new Mac.

Install macOS 15.1(If not already installed)

After this enabling apple intelligence was easy. I could pretty much instantly enable Apple Intelligence.

After that, I erased the Mac mini(Reset and start initial setup).

Restored it using the Time Machine backup I made.

After restoring it took about 30mins and now I can use Apple Intelligence.

It is quite a rigorous process, but for me it fixed the issue of being stuck on preparing. I don't know if this will work for iPad or iPhone, but if you really want Apple Intelligence to work, you can try this method though. Keep in mind that it might take a few hours, as you have to uninstall/reinstall/restore macOS/iOS/iPadOS multiple times. It took me about 4-5 hours for the complete process.

This has worked for me on two different Macs. On the Apple Intelligence window in Settings change your language to something other than English( I used Cantonese), close, reopen and switch to English (US). It works almost immediately.