Slimed Tahoe on M3 Air

[sashavegas]

I installed Tahoe on a MacBook Air with an M3 chip and 16GB of RAM. I decided to play around and remove some of the unnecessary apps Apple includes by default (such as Stocks, News, etc.) along with a few background services. After the usual steps of disabling csrutil and mounting the volume, I was able to slim it down.


Right now, it’s running perfectly, using only about 6GB of RAM compared to almost 12GB before. I removed everything related to Apple Intelligence, Siri, and several other useless apps.

 

[MarcusCarpenter]

Can you give us a tutorial on this?

 

[!!!]

Might as well remove all the other language packs, speech synthesis, linguistic data, non-latin fonts, Apple's Photos Print Products (why is this installed by default and not on-demand???), and desktop pictures.

Oh and if you've not disabled AI you'll have the models for that downloaded that you can delete. In addition to Siri, dictionaries, more non-latin fonts, and other assorted "assets" in the AssetsV2 folder.

 

[fisherking]

won't those apps just be re-installed after every update? and am pretty sure you mean 'slimmed' (altho 'slimed' is more fun) 🤔

 

[sashavegas]

Can you give us a tutorial on this?

First disable csrutil from startup menu

Open terminal and type

csrutil disable
csrutil authenticated-root disable

Reboot

Create mnt volume
sudo mkdir -p -m777 mnt

Find sealed volume
mount | grep sealed

Returned
/dev/disk3s1s1 on / (apfs, sealed, local, read-only, journaled)

Mount mnt

sudo mount -o nobrowse -t apfs /dev/disk3s1 mnt/

To disable services from LaunchAgent and LaunchDemon
For example

sudo mv mnt/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.familycircled.plist mnt/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.familycircled.plist.bak

continue to whatever services you want to disable

To remove apps

For example remove News

sudo rm -rf mnt/System/Applications/News.app

once done you need to seal volume with the following command

sudo bless --mount mnt/System/Library/CoreServices \

--bootefi --create-snapshot && sudo reboot

 

[thebart]

On the Windows side, there's a guy who maintains some kind of installation script that lets normal users select out all the stuff they don't want during install. I think Microsoft makes this possible so that enterprises can customize their Windows installs. I suppose Mac is too locked down to allow anything like that, but I would love it

 

[sashavegas]

It will be so nice if apple have base minimum system and let user install whatever they want as supplemental pack. But it quite opposite. Each iteration of os bring more bloatware and unnecessary crap

 

[losthismarbles]

Would actually repeat fisherking's question;

Wouldn't a subsequent update revert all these?

* given what we're to expect from 27, my plan is to perma-lock me in 27.6, ie right before the typical firmware "upgrade" that is masked as XX.7; and then do something like the above. No matter how optimised all these background-running daemons are, there's no magical OS Scheduler. Having to bounce 8464527 services i never use but am forced to keep active must have its consequences; and i mean in actual, everyday scenarios (snappiness/reaction times).

 

[bogdanw]

Wouldn't a subsequent update revert all these?

Yes.

 

[losthismarbles]

Was being semi-rhetorical, but.. yeah 🙂

On topic, your memory isn't the indicator it would have been if you were in Windows.
What it reserves, it can quickly flush out when necessary. And it does this in accordance with your total capacity too:

This session's running for barely over 24 hours; left on its own, you'll see it rise as far as 16, 17GB tops.
But that's because it can.

The measurements you need to take to define whether this worked positively for you or not are far from this superficial.
(though again, simple logic dictates the benefits are there; as mentioned, this is something i'll one day do myself. But not so i can look at my RAM usage and cry 'wonder'. Memory management in Macs is superb, the screenie in the OP isn't proof of anything, not on its own)