Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

Re:Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe? by lapcat on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:15PM (#46649771)

You appear to be confusing System Integrity Protection with the Signed System Volume. FileVault works fine with SIP disabled. But you can't disable SSV without disabling FileVault.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe? by spijdar on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:19PM (#46649838)

Yes, this is true! I was thinking about "disabling SIP" in the sense of being able to modify the system to e.g. disable the Spotlight launchd service. My mistake.

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)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe? by lapcat on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:26PM (#46649953)

You don't need to modify the system volume. Once SIP is disabled, you can then use standard launchctl commands to disable system launchd jobs.

[ Parent | on HN ]