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Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

eclecticlight.co

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Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#41

My org disables Siri on the work laptop, I’m new to having a mac at work, so not sure if it’s the norm

My work does the same thing. Logging into iCloud is not allowed and last I checked, it was actually disabled. So that means no Siri, Facetime, etc.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#42
I ran into this yesterday. My entire machine was running slow. I checked Activity Monitor and it was mediaanalysisd running at 100% for about an hour. i couldn't kill it as it would just restart. A search said I was S.O.L. unless I disabled SIP. (can't, it's a work laptop)

Further, Spotlight is completely broken in Tahoe. I have all categories off in System Preferences except Apps because it's the only thing I use or want to use spotlight for, a quick way to launch apps. But as of Tahoe 26.2 or so Spotlight is showing tons of non-app results so it's no longer useful as an app launcher.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#43
post #38
post #5

It's a shame Apple has decided that if the launch agent or daemon lives in the System folder that means the user/admin should have zero control over it. I should be able to disable any launchd job on my computer end of story.

You’re very entitled to your opinion, but it should be fairly obvious why this isn’t reasonable from their perspective. Put another way, let’s just say I think apple is glad you’re not making decisions about how their operating system should work. It’s an OS built for users, not those who wish to have iron control over everything. Allowing that would be disastrous for most users just to appease the very small percent…

How is allowing the user the power to disable software on the device they own "disastrous" for anyone

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#44
post #43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re very entitled to your opinion, but it should be fairly obvious why this isn’t reasonable from their perspective. Put another way, let’s just say I think apple is glad you’re not making decisions about how their operating system should work. It’s an OS built for users, not those who wish to have iron control over everything. Allowing that would be disastrous for most users just to appease the very small percent…

How is allowing the user the power to disable software on the device they own "disastrous" for anyone

In general or in this case?

I'm also curious about this specific case.

In general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XaJdDqQA0

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#45
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is that you can't disable SIP without _also_ disabling disk encryption ("FileVault"), because Apple changed from full disk encryption to only encrypting user data, and relying on SIP and crypto hashes to protect the system partition. Therefore, you can't "safely" disable SIP, as you'd be able to boot into recovery mode and perform an evil maid attack. This is really irritating, both that: - I can't "accept…

I know the writing has been on the wall for a while but as a former fanboy, I just didn't see it. When SIP was released, it was my first "ah ha" wake-up call that Apple is no longer building software for me. Ten years later, it's still getting worse. This idea that the owner of the computer is not the ultimate authority over what is running on that computer is slowly seeping its way into macOS and with every release…

[deleted]

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#46

I ran into this yesterday. My entire machine was running slow. I checked Activity Monitor and it was mediaanalysisd running at 100% for about an hour. i couldn't kill it as it would just restart. A search said I was S.O.L. unless I disabled SIP. (can't, it's a work laptop) Further, Spotlight is completely broken in Tahoe. I have all categories off in System Preferences except Apps because it's the only thing I use or…

I have the same problem. It wants to launch iPhone apps instead of the Mac apps. Super frustrating.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#47
As hinted with the Finder comment, "Spotlight" is behind much more than the command-space search box. I don't know what the Siri services might do other than Siri itself, but wouldn't shock me if they were involved in things like Shortcuts and Control Center widgets. I understand thinking things you don't use are simply a "waste of CPU and storage space", but this reads like the kind of posts I used to see in the Windows XP era where people would open Task Manager and kill random processes they didn't understand. Best to make a little more effort to understand what the OS is doing before taking a scalpel to it. Or if you'd rather not, there's always OpenBSD (being serious here, it's pretty cool).

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#48

Went down this rabbit hole a few months ago seeing whether it was at all possible to disable the automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS. Wasn't able to figure out how to do so but this blog was absolutely the best resource for digging one layer deeper on all things Spotlight-related, highly recommend.

Haven't tested this, but try: System Settings > General > Language & Region > Live Text "Select text in images to copy or take action."

I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#49
post #7

I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files? I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?

Personally I store a list of my files, with tags, in a sqlite database. Granted, I have a lot of custom tooling to make that practical..

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#50

This is becoming a more serious problem now Siri is going to be Google powered.

Supposedly there is no data shared with Google when using Gemini-powered Siri:

Google’s model will reportedly run on Apple’s own servers, which in practice means that no user data will be shared with Google. Instead, they won’t leave Apple’s Private Cloud Compute structure.[1]

1: https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/05/google-gemini-1-billion-deal-...

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