Spotlight and Siri have some overlaps in their origins: both began as a highlighted feature of a new version of macOS, are deeply rooted in the system and have steadily added additional functions over the years. Both are also characterized by a comparatively high hunger for resources: Spotlight’s various indexing and identification services analyze documents and media in the background, Siri recognizes voice input, gives answers and wants to preemptively suggest user actions. Every user evaluates how successful the two are differently – and whether this effort is justified on their own Mac. Howard Oakley investigated the question of whether the two multifunctional services can be switched off – and if so, how. According to Oakley’s findings, completely switching off both Siri and Spotlight is not possible. But with a few tricks, both Siri and Spotlight can be largely deactivated, thus reducing their performance requirements to a minimum. With the voice assistant Siri, this is relatively easy: For this purpose, you just have to open the Settings app and move the slide switch to the left for Siri requests under “Apple Intelligence & Siri” (or “Siri” on Intel Macs). The function is not completely switched off, because services like “siriactionsd” and “siriknowledged” continue to appear in system logs and in the activity display – although much less often.
Siri can still be easily deactivated in the system settings.
Spotlight is more difficult
The system-wide search with complete index is significantly older than Siri; That’s why Apple hasn’t made any provision for easy deactivation. However, if you use an alternative launcher, such as LaunchBar or Alfred, you may have little use for Spotlight’s functionality. In the Spotlight entry in the system settings, users can exclude “related content” and the content of individual apps from the search. Nevertheless, the computationally intensive media analysis remains active, which creates a full-text index of all files on the Mac – including text and motif recognition in PDFs, images and videos.
Spotlight finds a lot of things – that takes computing power.
Switch off via command line
According to Oakley, there is a command line command that limits the system-wide search to the maximum. To do this, open the Terminal utility and enter the following command:
sudo mdutil -a -d
Confirm this command with the Enter key. This would disable both Spotlight searches and content indexing. According to his observations, services such as “mediaanalysisd”, “mds” and “spotlightknowledged” are still present in the system and are occasionally active, although less frequently. To reactivate Spotlight, you can also use the terminal – the following command restores the usual functionality:
sudo mdutil -a -i on
