101–110 of 118 posts
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sudo or equivalent has been around for quite a long time now.
You think regular people can be trusted with sudo? (Absolutely not.)
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.
If that were possible, malware would shut down a mountain of services very quickly. Right off the bat, XProtect, MRT, Gatekeeper, amfid, system updates, telemetry, MDM...
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semi-unrelated tip - on ios, most telemetry options can be disabled under
Settings -> privacy & security -> Analytics & Improvements
However, there is a whole separate telemetry setting:
Settings -> search -> help apple improve search
note that this doesn't show up if you search for it in settings. (try searching for "help apple" or "improve")
and of course the whole "learn from this app" and other siri settings that are all individual settings.
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-...
We still have Google models running on hardware people pay thousands of dollars for, under the impression it wasn't a Google device.
Imagine the gigantic temptation of gigantic wads of cash Google would pay Apple to allow Gemini to index and produce analytics about your data on your machine.
Now Google have a foot in the door.
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You had full root for more than a decade on any macOS machine.
And then you didn't. What's the purpose of saying this? All consumer-operating systems also used to be single user with administrative access by default. Shall we return to that, too?
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.
This carried and I can still do that. But not on System apps. So now any system app is twice without ability to easily 'diet' it:
file /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e] /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64 /System/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit (for architecture arm64e): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e
It won't be marketing wonder when new macOS dropping Intel will be it's 25% smaller (I guess they'll take the extra size for on-device models are other feature you won't be able to remove :) )
Apple Configurator MDM profiles can control Siri behavior, e.g. https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS Disable server-side logging of Siri requests for your Mac, iPhone and iPad You can disable Siri (and Apple Intelligence) entirely via Apple Configurator or asking the nearest LLM for .mobileconfig file with: allowAssistant
Also note that you don't need a supervised iOS device for it, it can be installed on any Apple device.
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What's the best way to disable all MacOS image processing background services?
There isn't any such service; it's on demand.
photoanalysisd
mediaanalysisd
com.apple.photos.backgroundAnalysisServiceEarlier quoted context omitted.
I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.
this is what grep is for. Why do I need a service constantly indexing my system and wasting resources for the few times a month I might need to run grep ? what problem was really solved here?
Oh it doesn't have those things so is a non-option.
Tahoe in general sucks but Spotlight has been a pretty good local search for nearly twenty years. The image OCR added in Sonoma made it even more useful.
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.