How to enable Apple Intelligence when booting from an external drive Enable Apple Intelligence when starting up from an external drive.
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.
For these reasons Apple disables Apple Intelligence when your Startup Disk is an external drive.
Another issue is that Apple also disables Apple Pay on external drives on the Mac (also for security reasons).
The other reason Apple disables Apple Intelligence on external drives is it consumes a lot of system resources.
