Deleting Pre Installed Mac Apps (Chess, etc.)

manowar wrote:

Funny, I was just looking into this topic sooooo, I guess it's about as much of an issue as it was when it was originally posted.

Never understood why people care whether or not a thread is raised from the dead. If the forum allows it why should you care?

I suppose it depends on what you have to add. Which is?

Pete

a forum is for questions and answers. If you actually read my post youd realize my question was answered within the thread. No need to add anything to the discussion. But congratulations. You answered your own questions. Troll on kiddo!

Good. Only took you three years.😝

I ca t see where you mentioned that. Please point it out for us.

Bye

Pete

It may not save tons of room to remove apps you know you won't use, but yes, you can get rid of a lot of them. I delete a lot of the apps OS X installs. Especially Font Book since it will interfere with third party font managers. I always use Suitcase, so Font Book has to go.

OS X will say display a message that you can't delete (example) Chess, because it is required by the OS. Well, that of course is just flat out baloney. Before explaining how to remove them, we should answer your concerns, first.

1) No, it won't affect the OS to remove many of the apps it installs, as long as don't remove truly necessary ones. While you may never use Automator, the OS and other apps use it in the background to perform some of their functions. So do not ever remove Automator.

Many of them can go bye-bye. In the Applications folder, I delete Calendar, Chess, Dashboard, Face Time, Font Book, Game Center, iBooks, Launchpad, Mail (I use Outlook), Messages, Mission Control, Notes, Photo Booth, Reminders, Stickies and Time Machine (I use SuperDuper! for my backups). From the Utilities folder, I remove AirPort Utility (I don't have an AirPort router), VoiceOver Utility and X11.

2) No, it won't affect updates. Say for example you've removed Font Book and the update has some patch files for it. It it creates anything at all on the drive (sometimes it doesn't), the updater will recreate a Font Book application package that will contain only the updated files. Since the rest of it is missing, it will be non functional. You just delete the stub data after the update.

So how to remove them? There's two ways.

Method 1) From the desktop, highlight an app you want to get rid of and press Command+I, or choose File > Get Info from the menu bar (same thing). Click the padlock and enter your admin password so you can change its permissions. Change everything to Read & Write. Click the + button and double click your admin name in the list that appears to give yourself permissions for the app. Also make that Read & Write. Close the Get Info window and you can put the item in the trash with no interference from OS X.

Method 2) Open Terminal in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Type the following:

sudo rm -r

Put a space after the -r and stop. Now drag and drop the app you want to remove into the Terminal window. Terminal will fill in the path and filename of that item. Press Enter. If you haven't ever used sudo before, it will display a message about the dangers of using sudo (Super User DO). If you don't know what you're doing in Terminal, it's a really good way to goose your computer as you are giving yourself temporary root privileges. So it's just saying there's no safety net here. What you tell Unix to do is what will happen. Proceed at your own peril. You'll only see this message once.

Enter your admin password. Nothing is returned on screen, so make sure you type it correctly. Nothing nasty will happen if your enter it incorrectly. Unix will simply refuse to complete the command. After you press Enter (and assuming your password is correct), the app will be deleted with no fanfare or message. Terminal will simply move to the next command prompt line and wait for your next order.

You can speed this up a lot by highlighting the sudo rm -r text (and its space at the end) and pressing Command+C to copy it. Then for each item you want to remove it's Command+V to paste that line, drag in the next app you want to delete and press Enter. Terminal won't ask for your password each time.

That is great Kurt, thanks very much. good to know, very much appreciated

And I just noticed this was a resurrected topic. Oh well, it's still useful info.

Definetly.

we don't all have the most up to date machines, with massive HDD's,

i never see the point in starting a new thread, when there is an old one with same question. all the info for one subject in same place.

rather than Get Info to change properties, I now use FileXamimer, but otherwise I managed to get a lot of my useless apps gone too.

thanks once again for being one of the 'good guys'

i know, right? sheesh😩