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...
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.
Chrome added a feature called "Memory Saver" that suspends tabs in the background. I believe other browsers have similar features.
Disabling and then re-enabling Javascript will cause my bank's web site to log you out, requiring full 2FA to log in again.
Right off the bat, XProtect, MRT, Gatekeeper, amfid, system updates, telemetry, MDM...
This is really irritating, both that:
- I can't "accept the risk" and force disk encryption anyway. This may be technically possible if you bludgeon the OS enough, but it's definitely not something the built in CLI tooling supports.
- I can't use the old full disk encryption mode. Presumably, this code does or did still exist somewhere, but isn't supported because it's not used in any supported configuration.
So you're left with the option of having no disk encryption on your laptop, or having SIP.
EDIT: I'm thinking of SSV, not SIP per se. But when it comes to disabling the built-in launchd services like Spotlight, you have to disable SSV to do so, and that requires disabling FileVault.
I'm finally starting to de-Applify my home computing and slowly removing my and my family's dependence on the Apple ecosystem. Replacing an old Mac Mini here, replacing an old MacBook there. It's been a long time coming, but I'm out.
I'm not even mentioning Tahoe which is a disaster but doesn't bother me because I don't have a single machine that can run anything past Ventura anyway.
But still -- you can't "unlock" the system (in this sense) without disabling SSV, which requires disabling FileVault.
(Unless I'm wrong about that too, and there is a way to disable Spotlight without disabling SSV)
I'm also curious about this specific case.
In general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XaJdDqQA0
https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS
Disable server-side logging of Siri requests for your Mac, iPhone and iPad
<key>allowAssistant</key><false/>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.
I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?
A feature I never wanted has ruined a feature I do want. It’s a complete own goal. In frustration I turned spotlight off completely a few months ago. Rip.
also, for opening apps, https://charmstone.app/ is pretty great.
what problem was really solved here?
I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want.
But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.
I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.
Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.
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.
System Settings > General > Language & Region > Live Text
"Select text in images to copy or take action."
automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS
Maybe Apple could offer a $200 upgrade on Mac purchase to get it without all of the Apple Intelligence features?
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-...
People like him are an inspiration to me.
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.
Now that causes the screen to freeze for half a second (possibly my fault - I have 'reduce animations' switched on, but it seems to freeze the screen for the duration of the animation that would previously have played), and then the colour wheel spins for a couple of seconds, and then it might finally respond to my keyboard input... but even then, it fails to find the app maybe 20% of the time. This is on a ~1yo M4 Macbook Pro w/ 36 GB RAM.
So for the past month I've been training myself to alt+tab round to the finder window and navigate to the apps folder from there.
I've never been much of a Macos fan, but this is shockingly poor - less of a papercut, more a wedge of smouldering bamboo shoved under my fingernails.