Deinstall the News App

Hi hermann260,

I located the same process on my Mac, but found it using little to no CPU consumption. Please post an EtreCheck report so that we can take a closer look at what is happening on your Mac.

Regarding the News app itself: macOS Big Sur operates using two volumes on your Mac: the System volume (read-only), and the Data volume.

The System volume contains macOS and its required resources, and is marked read-only. In macOS Big Sur, the live system volume isn't used; instead, a sealed snapshot is used instead. Snapshots by nature are read-only; they cannot be modified at all. For some unfortunate reason, Apple chose to put its preinstalled apps (including News) on the system volume, which means that they can't be deleted like normal apps.

If you have the technical expertise, you could disable the requirement for the system volume to be signed by Apple, mount the live system volume as read-write, delete the News app from there, and then create a new system snapshot to be used. While this may seem great, it has several drawbacks:

• On Apple silicon Macs (M1 and later), this downgrades the boot security to the lowest level, Permissive Security.

• Your customizations will be lost in the next macOS update.

• When its time to update, the entire 11 GB installer will be downloaded instead of the usual 2-3 GB update. This is because macOS can't find Apple's signature on the system snapshot, and therefore needs to re-write the entire system volume.

hermann260 wrote:

My macbook pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) runs on Big Sur Version 11.6.

Since months I have have the problem that the apple News app (with a process called NewsToday2)

uses a lot of CPU time (often over 90%) and downloads endless information from the web. I never read (and want to read) all this, nor was asked to install the app. The problem: one can force quite the process, but it starts again by itself within minutes. I have tried to deinstall the app: not possible (I tried simply moving it to the trash from finder, not allowed; I then found the location of this apple product and went there in the xterm terminal and tried to remove it with rm and versions of it, no success, because not allowed....). I spent 2 times hours on the phone with apple technicians trying to sort this out. No success - even though these people seemed capable and of good spirit. At the end, the only suggestion was: reinstall your whole system once again. This takes days, and as News is a part of the Big Sur, I don't see the use. By the way, we also ran malware, nothing bad found...

I guess this request goes to apple developers: please allow people to deinstall a program like News in one of the next updates of Big Sur!

Of course: any other helpful suggestion is very much appreciated - although I am not sure how it gets to me as I usually don't use this discussion page.

I have used Macbooks for decades, but am almost ready to change to something else due to this.

Receive or stop receiving the Apple News newsletter - Apple ...

How to turn notifications and emails on or off in Apple News

You're welcome. It's not a virus/malware. After looking into it a bit I found out what it is. It's the News Widget running in the Notification Center. If you remove the widget it won't run.

FWIW, I checked the three Macs I have running Big Sur 11.6 and none have a "NewsToday2" process, whether the News app is running or not.

When I found it, it wasn't using up much CPU time. And of course some find it useful. Especially all the people that posted they were unhappy that the Widget is now limited to six stocks.

You're welcome btw. I'm not quite awake. :)