Let Me Uninstall Spotlight

So I opened Activity Monitor, and there they were again.
mds_stores
mdworker_shared
corespotlightd
photoanalysisd
mediaanalysisd
photolibraryd

A whole little committee of Apple processes, all busy, all important, all convinced that my Mac exists first for their benefit and only second for mine.

And yes, these processes correspond to real features. In macOS Tahoe 26, Apple is openly selling Spotlight as the biggest update it has ever had. Apple says Spotlight now mixes files, folders, events, apps, messages, web suggestions, clipboard history, and “hundreds of actions” into one central surface. Photos is doing People & Pets recognition, landmark lookup, natural-language search, memory movies, and object cleanup. This is not an accident. This is the product.

That is also exactly the problem. In my latest case, it was indexing a lot of temporary files, including images and videos, created by extensive test suites. The indexing process was much heavier than the tests themselves… I don’t need that, I don’t want that.

Apple keeps adding these layers as though every Mac user wants the same Mac. Every Mac should search everything. Every Mac should classify every face. Every Mac should identify pets, landmarks, text in images, and “moments.” Every Mac should be ready to manufacture a sentimental memory movie the instant the mood strikes. Every Mac should be a showroom demo unit.

Mine should not.

This is not even a privacy panic. Apple says Enhanced Visual Search in Photos works with on-device processing and without sending your photos or videos to Apple. That is really great, and Apple commitment to privacy is why I bought an Apple device in the first place! My complaint is more basic: if the work is local, if the features are optional to me, and if the cost is CPU time, RAM pressure, disk writes, disk wear, and background churn, then I should be able to say no.

Instead, Apple gives you half-measures.

For Spotlight, the official playbook is mostly about recovery, not refusal. Rebuild the index. Exclude a folder. Exclude a disk. Then wait while it reindexes again. Apple’s own docs say that if Spotlight is indexing, your Mac may stay awake for hours. Apple also says that even if you exclude a Time Machine backup disk, Spotlight still indexes it because Time Machine needs that indexing, and that part cannot be turned off. That sentence tells you everything about the Apple worldview: your preference matters until it collides with Apple’s design, and then your preference loses.

Photos is worse, because Apple barely pretends there is a true off switch at all. Apple documents People & Pets, pet detection, landmark search, natural-language search, memory movies, and object cleanup. Apple even says pet detection can take days, and on the Mac it runs while you are not using the app. Yet the documented Photos settings are about things like memory notifications and resetting suggestions, not “stop analyzing my library,” not “disable People & Pets,” not “never run photo analysis again.” You can tune the decorations. You do not get to remove the engine.

And before anyone says this is theoretical whining, the horror stories are very real.

There is an Apple Support Community thread where corespotlightd is reported above 400% CPU, with pinwheels under light tasks, display flicker, and even a kernel panic. The thread grew large enough that by early 2026 people were still adding workarounds and postmortems. Then there is a Tahoe 26.0.1 Mac Studio owner on MacRumors reporting the same class of failure, again with corespotlightd above 400%, freezes, and repeated crashes on a machine that should have been loafing through ordinary desktop work.

There is another Apple Communities report where mds_stores kept running with the lid closed for about twenty-three hours and wrote 300 GB to disk, on a machine with only about 100 GB of used storage. A MacRumors user after the Sequoia update reported more than 400 GB of data written by mds_stores in a few days. This is the point where “background indexing” stops sounding like a tidy abstraction and starts sounding like your SSD is being used as a chew toy.

On the Photos side, one Apple Communities report describes photolibraryd ramping past 40 GB of memory and triggering “running out of application memory” warnings while also chewing a full CPU core. A MacRumors thread describes mediaanalysisd swelling system data by roughly 80 GB. An older Apple Communities case is maybe the most revealing of the lot: Photos became nearly unusable because Apple’s image-conversion and analysis machinery sat on a single JPEG for more than an hour at roughly 70 to 90% CPU. One JPEG. One hour. This is not “just let it finish.” This is software wandering off into the woods.

And the really maddening part is that it is not one-size-fits-all failure. It is not always “too many files” or “too many photos.” One of the more interesting 2026 follow-ups in the giant corespotlightd thread traced the issue to a heavily edited 100-page Pages document stored in iCloud Drive. The user copied the file, moved the copy out, deleted the revision-heavy original, restarted, and watched corespotlightd drop to 0.1% CPU. Another commenter in that same thread sketched the pattern as Pages revision history plus Spotlight plus cloud activity. That is exactly the sort of edge case that hits power users, researchers, writers, lawyers, and anyone else whose documents are not small, clean, and disposable. The “works for most people” defense is no comfort when your actual workflow is the one being punished.

Now, to be fair, not every scary graph in Activity Monitor means macOS is on fire. On Apple silicon, a lot of this background work is pushed onto efficiency cores, and that is one reason modern Macs stay responsive more often than they deserve to. Apple now breaks more work into smaller background processes, and the architecture tries to keep that noise away from the performance cores your foreground apps need. So yes, a Mac with many busy helper processes is not automatically a broken Mac.

But that defense only goes so far.

“Don’t worry, they are mostly on the efficiency cores” is not the same thing as consent. It does not solve runaway disk writes. It does not solve sleep disruption. It does not solve a bad interaction between Spotlight, Pages revisions, and iCloud. It does not solve Photos daemons deciding that some forgotten pile of screenshots deserves a week-long archaeology project. And it certainly does not solve the most important question: why am I still forced to carry features I do not use?

That is where Apple’s appliance model shows its teeth.

macOS protects system content with a signed system volume and System Integrity Protection. Apple describes the system side as read-only, signature-checked, and resistant to tampering. From a security point of view, it makes sense and this is another good reason to buy Apple systems. But it also means Apple, not the owner of the machine, gets to decide which bundled subsystems count as untouchable “system content” and which ones are just apps. When the system is sealed, bundling becomes policy.

And that is why Apple’s own behavior around Apple Intelligence is so revealing. Apple documents a real off switch for it. Its on-device models download when enabled, and that those models are removed when the feature is turned off. So Apple clearly knows how to build optional components, download them, and remove them again while keeping the platform secure. The idea that Spotlight’s action layers, Photos analysis daemons, or similar bundled machinery must be fused forever into the body of macOS is not a law of nature. It is a product decision.

That is why the answer I want is simple.

Maybe some non-technical users do want everything out of the box. Fine. Ship the full guided tour. Turn on Spotlight actions. Turn on People & Pets. Turn on memory movies. Turn on landmark search. Turn on every cheerful, magical feature Apple needs for the keynote.

But give advanced users a real broom.

Let us:

• uninstall Spotlight’s deeper indexing layers if we do not want them
• remove Photos and its analysis agents if we keep libraries elsewhere
• purge the indexes, caches, helper processes, and model files
• stop them from respawning, without disabling half of macOS security
• get rid of background processes, leftover launch jobs, and “system data” blobs that reappear a week later.

I don’t want to just “feature this person less often”, “exclude a folder” or “rebuild the index”, “wait a few days”… I want to uninstall! Maybe I’m not alone.

PS: If anyone at Apple reads this, it’s probably a good idea to support this for the wonderful MacBook Neo!