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I tried using terminal with sudo or su, while I do rm -rf to Photos.app, Chess.app, Mail.app, DVD Player.app, iBooks.app, but it said Operation not permitted.

How can I delete these apps?

(OS X version is 10.11.1)

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  • Maybe you should look it up before you do it. El Capitan has SIP (sometimes called rootless). I wouldn't recommend deleting Mail. – At0mic Nov 15 '15 at 3:17
  • on 10.11.0 i can do it, and no problem at all – uray Nov 15 '15 at 6:47
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    Why delete them, they don't take that much space? And I doubt that you have been able to delete them while running any public version of El Capitan (unless you've disabled SIP). – nohillside♦ Nov 15 '15 at 7:03
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    Possible duplicate of Is it possible to delete the "useless" apps pre-installed on my Mac? – grg♦ Nov 15 '15 at 11:15
  • Situation regarding deletion of standard applications changed with El Capitan, don't think it's a duplicate as such. The reasons why deleting them is a bad idea haven't changed though. – nohillside♦ Nov 15 '15 at 13:29
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Being OS X El Capitan (10.11) has, from what I understand, the same System Integrity Protection as the current version, macOS High Sierra (10.13), I think the steps are the same. You can delete at least some of the applications. I haven't tried them all but I deleted Maps, Chess and DVD Player.

First, you need to boot into Recovery Mode. Hold CMD + R after the boot chime. From there you can go into the Terminal and type csrutil disable. Reboot. This disables System Integrity Protection and is not recommended to keep disabled. If you want to live on the edge though, go for it.

After booting back into OS X/macOS I was able to sudo rm -rf <Application Path> without any errors.

You can always re-enable SIP after you make your changes.

Note 1: I deleted iTunes once but a system update later put it back on.

Note 2: You cannot easily get deleted applications back because you cannot download them, to my knowledge.

Note 3: If you are just sick of looking at them in Finder, you can hide them by adding a hidden flag to the folder. SIP has to be disabled for this too. I used sudo chflags hidden /Applications/App\ Store.app/ to hide the App Store from Finder.

Note 4: Certain OS features may depend on apps being present so be wary of what you delete.

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You don't. You have no reason to. SIP is stopping you.

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