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)
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)
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.