Honestly I have no idea if they have the best answer, but I thoroughly respect a blog post like this that is so concise/wastes no time. Here is the issue, here is what we want to do, here is what it won’t do, ultimately this is the best solution we have come up with + clear instructions.
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.
It's related to the entire security balance which is bad (imho).
Until that separation, in the PowerPC/Intel supported days you had the option to remove one from the fat binary (Universal Binary 1).
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:
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 :) )
I've always thought of iOS and iPadOS as appliance OSes, but macOS as the thing I retained control over. It's changes like this that are nudging me back to Linux as a daily driver for my desktop, not just for headless work.
Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.
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.
A small but big detail that irritates me is one used to be able to search Applications faster through the dedicated Applications overlay, but now this behavior appears to just be a shortcut to Spotlight, which suffers from incredibly poor index planning.
In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications.
Now I'd have to use Finder, but opening that up would be slow enough that I'd almost need a desktop shortcut.
So, in essence, I have to hack around the most common functionality of using an application on an operating system, which is finding the damn thing. And this is supposed to be the most polished operating system on the market?
Apple frequently appears to be asleep at the wheel.
Tahoe's new Spotlight refresh includes an application specific option (open spotlight then arrow/cursor to the right or press cmd+1), and it will only match on applications, which is indeed very fast compared to a full blown Spotlight search...
except it doesn't match on Apple's built-in applications like Calendar or Screenshot.app, which makes it useless to me since I don't mentally separate Apple Apps from third party ones when trying to find or search for apps.
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]
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.
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).
If some process is going to take hours of cpu time, it should be opt in. At a minimum I’d like to be able to turn the bloody things off if I don’t want them.
I run cpu usage meters in my menu bar. The efficiency cores always seem busy doing one thing or another on modern macOS. It feels like Apple treats my e-cores as a playground for stupid features that their developers want a lot more than I do - like photoanalysisd, or file indexing to power spotlight, that hasn’t worked how I want it to for a decade.
I have a Linux workstation, and the difference in responsiveness is incredible. Linux feels like a breath of fresh air. On a technical level, my workstation cpu is barely any faster. But it idles at 0%. Whenever I issue a command, I feel like the computer has been waiting for me and then it springs to action immediately.
To your point, I don’t care why these random processes are using all my cpu. I just want them to stop. I paid good money for my Apple laptop. The computer is for me. I didn’t pay all that money so some Apple engineer can vomit all over with their crappy, inefficient code.
With nobody at Apple handling the engineering problem of implementing user requests, we're stuck with what we got. So I highly recommend App Tamer by St. Clair Software (no affiliation), which lets you set how much CPU percentage each process can use:
It does cost $14.95 USD, but it's given me my computer back for years now. I have Spotlight Indexer set to 10%, although I'm using an old version of macOS and don't know if that's mdutil now or if Apple has outsmarted its throttling. I also set web browsers to 10% when they're in the background. And you can always message the developer with feature requests.
A bit of a rant: I honestly feel that we've done process scheduling wrong in most OSs and apps. It should have always been up to the user, along with granting permissions as needed. And I can't believe that no web browser has implemented turning JavaScript off after perhaps 10 seconds for example, so that we can have as many tabs open as we want. Instead we've let the technology order us what to do. It's all just so wrong. But the barriers to entry for writing a new browser are so high that only large organizations can do it, and they choose not to, so help isn't coming. Although I think with the arrival of AI, we're going to start seeing real software again that makes a mockery of the status quo and hopefully eats its lunch.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadThis 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 :) )
I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?
Apple is not there yet, but kind of drifting towards becoming the new windows.
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.
In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications.
Now I'd have to use Finder, but opening that up would be slow enough that I'd almost need a desktop shortcut.
So, in essence, I have to hack around the most common functionality of using an application on an operating system, which is finding the damn thing. And this is supposed to be the most polished operating system on the market?
Apple frequently appears to be asleep at the wheel.
except it doesn't match on Apple's built-in applications like Calendar or Screenshot.app, which makes it useless to me since I don't mentally separate Apple Apps from third party ones when trying to find or search for apps.
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-...
https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS
You can disable Siri (and Apple Intelligence) entirely via Apple Configurator or asking the nearest LLM for .mobileconfig file with:Also note that you don't need a supervised iOS device for it, it can be installed on any Apple device.
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.
Incredibly, the current mitigation is a cronjob to SIGSTOP it once per minute. https://github.com/jac-jim/stop-mediaanalysisd
Yearslong history of this issue, with it getting harder and harder. https://gist.github.com/huksley/564be2c903312bcee7dffe415d12...
I run cpu usage meters in my menu bar. The efficiency cores always seem busy doing one thing or another on modern macOS. It feels like Apple treats my e-cores as a playground for stupid features that their developers want a lot more than I do - like photoanalysisd, or file indexing to power spotlight, that hasn’t worked how I want it to for a decade.
I have a Linux workstation, and the difference in responsiveness is incredible. Linux feels like a breath of fresh air. On a technical level, my workstation cpu is barely any faster. But it idles at 0%. Whenever I issue a command, I feel like the computer has been waiting for me and then it springs to action immediately.
To your point, I don’t care why these random processes are using all my cpu. I just want them to stop. I paid good money for my Apple laptop. The computer is for me. I didn’t pay all that money so some Apple engineer can vomit all over with their crappy, inefficient code.
https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/index.html
It does cost $14.95 USD, but it's given me my computer back for years now. I have Spotlight Indexer set to 10%, although I'm using an old version of macOS and don't know if that's mdutil now or if Apple has outsmarted its throttling. I also set web browsers to 10% when they're in the background. And you can always message the developer with feature requests.
A bit of a rant: I honestly feel that we've done process scheduling wrong in most OSs and apps. It should have always been up to the user, along with granting permissions as needed. And I can't believe that no web browser has implemented turning JavaScript off after perhaps 10 seconds for example, so that we can have as many tabs open as we want. Instead we've let the technology order us what to do. It's all just so wrong. But the barriers to entry for writing a new browser are so high that only large organizations can do it, and they choose not to, so help isn't coming. Although I think with the arrival of AI, we're going to start seeing real software again that makes a mockery of the status quo and hopefully eats its lunch.
Maybe Apple could offer a $200 upgrade on Mac purchase to get it without all of the Apple Intelligence features?