January 16, 2026
You can mute it, not boot it
Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?
You can’t kill Siri or Spotlight—only muzzle them, and users are fuming
TLDR: You can’t fully shut off Siri or Spotlight in macOS Tahoe, but you can mostly mute them by turning off Siri Requests and using a command to stop Spotlight’s indexing and searching. Comments split between “give me full control” and “don’t break search,” with extra heat over background image scanning.
Apple’s latest twist: you can’t fully turn off Siri or Spotlight in macOS Tahoe—at least not without scary “surgery.” The blog lays it out cleanly: flip off Siri Requests, then run a Terminal command to shut Spotlight indexing and searching. It’s tidy, but the comment section? Absolute fireworks.
On one side, the “my Mac, my rules” crowd is raging. One user fumes that Apple locking background helpers (aka daemons) behind system walls means they can’t stop what runs on their own machine. Another went hunting for a way to stop macOS from auto-reading text in photos (“OCR”) and struck out—adding a privacy-and-performance twist to the drama. Meanwhile, a calmer voice applauds the blog’s no-nonsense clarity, calling it the best guide they’ve seen.
Then there’s the custody battle over Spotlight. One camp asks, basically, “If you kill Spotlight, how do you find anything?” They admit it’s flaky—especially inside Mail—but still essential. The other camp wants the nuclear option: no indexing, no searches, no background chugging, period. The blog suggests using mdutil -a -d (a power-user switch) to shut Spotlight’s brain off; even then, some invisible helpers pop up briefly at startup. The meme energy? “Siri, go to sleep.” Siri: “I can’t do that.”
Key Points
- •Disabling Siri in macOS Tahoe is done by turning off Siri Requests in System Settings, but some Siri processes still run.
- •Disabling all Spotlight items in System Settings doesn’t stop indexing or searches and may slow Finder operations.
- •Using “sudo mdutil -a -i off” disables indexing but not searches and can be unreliable on the Data volume.
- •Using “sudo mdutil -a -d” disables both Spotlight searches and indexing, effectively stopping search results.
- •Complete deactivation of Siri or Spotlight requires system-level modifications with SIP disabled; otherwise only minimal operation can be achieved.