why can't I delete preinstalled apple apps like books, taking up 129 mb that I need.

If you need space, the best solution is to move some or most of your user data to an external drive. Usually video libraries, music libraries, and photo libraries are the biggest consumption of user data space, all of which can be easily accessed from an external drive. In particular, SSD drives are quite small and and easily managed.

All the pre-installed Apple apps are quite small and generally insignificant in size compared with the user data.

Personally, I keep all those items on an external drive and only keep a bare minimum of my user data on the internal drive. The one advantage of this approach, there is no need to go through any special processes to transfer this data to a new computer, you just plug the data drive in.

Wow. Apple just followed Windows down the silly humans, we don't want you to break your own computer so we will make it impossible for you to do anything on it band wagon.

If I don't want stickies, I should be able to make it go away, all the way away.

It isn't trivial.

I do not want stocks or reminders or any of that useless garbage locked into my $1k device.

Is it that the answer is too difficult or that this is some kind of extortion to force people to buy disk cleaners or ?

The very reason I switched to Mac is to not have to walk through drying concrete to do basic maintenance and creative control with better technology all around and cohesive products. SO far, in person support lied and made me replace a 9 month old Mac, was battery swell... I bought a new one. And this one haw the same issue... hmm. I can not delete preinstalled garbage on my laptop and ... that's just the way it is. No support or community in this.

It is the way it is because Apple has decided that it is. There is nothing anyone can do. You cannot delete parts of the operating system components. If you want to complain, you need to address it with Apple - we are just other end users here and denigrating us will not change it.

Thanks - much appreciated!

FWIW, there are several native Apple apps I have never used and never will. The only place one can find them on my devices is in the Applications folder and everything is turned off (notifications, updates, etc) so they do not bother me because they don't take up all that much space.

129MB is a trivial amount of space. Think of it as 0.129GB.

You cannot delete it because it’s part of the operating system.

If you don't know how to do it why answer?

You are right, that’s not fair. My apologies.