Enable Apple Intelligence when starting up from an external drive. If you've moved your system to an external drive, Apple Intelligence normally won't work, but there's a workaround. Here's how to enable it. In our previous article we showed you how to enable Apple Intelligence and the ChatGPT extension on your Mac. But if you want to start up your Mac from an external drive and use Apple Intelligence, you'll be blocked.
While you can still use Siri while booted into an external drive, Apple Intelligence will be disabled. This is mainly for security reasons: if you use an external drive in some other location or facility, your drive may be connected to an external network - which may or may not contain malware or vulnerabilities you're not aware of.
Or you might leave a Mac workstation unattended by accident with your external drive attached where others may have access to it. For these reasons Apple disables Apple Intelligence when your Startup Disk is an external drive. The other reason Apple disables Apple Intelligence on external drives is it consumes a lot of system resources. If the external drive is connected to a Mac over USB it may cause performance problems - as USB is a relatively slow connection standard compared to Thunderbolt.
Another issue is that Apple also disables Apple Pay on external drives on the Mac (also for security reasons). Apple Intelligence also isn't yet available in some countries such as in the EU and in China. macOS includes a system process called eligibilityd which uses several inputs to determine which features are allowed or not allowed. These include the locale, language in use, country code, boot parameters, and more.
