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sageman72

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 16, 2015
22
19
so I don't really use the Music, Podcasts and TV apps, is it ok to remove them or are they so imbedded into macOS it would just cause trouble?
 
It's unlikely you could all traces of these, and even then it would be without inadvertently affecting something else. Are you running short on space?
 
Don’t. It’s ok to keep software on your computer that you don’t use, but especially software that is part of the standard system installation.
 
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not absolutely needed due to space or anything no, it's just my fetish for having as clean a system as possible that's kicking in I guess..I´ll ignore it, thanks
 
not absolutely needed due to space or anything no, it's just my fetish for having as clean a system as possible that's kicking in I guess..I´ll ignore it, thanks
I know how you feel.. I'd like to delete those apps as well as News. I don't think it would hurt anything to put them in a folder in the back of Launcher or the Applications tab of Finder. Might help you a bit.
 
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Yeah, just leave them be. Some of them, might not be an issue if deleted, others...

Taking a wild guess here, as have not tried to mess around with the stock apps. The stock apps are all in /System/Applications folder, except for Safari, which is installed in the user space /Applications.

Anything in /System/Applications is under System Integrity Protection (SIP). Additionally, if you have an SSD, it's in APFS format. The System level stuff is in a read-only partition. From what I've seen on the interwebs, at minimum, need to disable SIP, and might have to stay in Recovery Mode and mount the read-only partition as read/write. Command line to delete things.

And once gone, if want/need to recover what was deleted, need to re-install the OS, as the stock apps are not in App Store.
 
Anything in /System/Applications is under System Integrity Protection (SIP). Additionally, if you have an SSD, it's in APFS format. The System level stuff is in a read-only partition. From what I've seen on the interwebs, at minimum, need to disable SIP, and might have to stay in Recovery Mode and mount the read-only partition as read/write. Command line to delete things.
I ran nothing but GNU/Linux and BSD for almost 20 years and what you mentioned seems like a lot of work for very little gain. I realize it can be done, but my mind says "why bother?".. especially since there is no guarantee that the work won't cause issues elsewhere.
 
that what i did

Code:
#!/bin/bash

# IMPORTANT: You will need to disable SIP aka Rootless in order to fully execute this script, you can reenable it after.

    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Home.app
    echo "[OK] Home"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Dashboard.app
    echo "[OK] Dashboard.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/FaceTime.app
    echo "[OK] FaceTime.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/News.app
    echo "[OK] News.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Messages.app
    echo "[OK] Messages.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Siri.app
    echo "[OK] Siri.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Photos.app
    echo "[OK] Photos.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Stocks.app
    echo "[OK] Stocks.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/VoiceMemos.app
    echo "[OK] VoiceMemos.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Stickies.app
    echo "[OK] Stickies.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Maps.app
    echo "[OK] Maps.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/Photo\ Booth.app
    echo "[OK] Photos.app"
    
    sudo rm -rf /Applications/QuickTime\ Player.app
    echo "[OK] QuickTime"

and everything is working just fine
 
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