Fall is in the air: nights are getting cooler the leaves are starting to change, and the birds are heading south. As you think about raking leaves, putting your garden to rest, and cleaning up around the house don’t forget your Mac! I normally use this time of year to tidy up my machine. One step of my process is to take a look at the all of my installed applications to see what I may not need anymore and remove them.
Now why would you want to uninstall an application? Well, there may be many reasons but mainly uninstalling programs you no longer need frees up disk space and allow software upgrades to run smoothly. Often machines can start to slow down or freeze when they are running out of disk space or maybe there are new applications out there that you would like to explore and have fun with. Having fun is what it is all about, right? If you’ve had challenges upgrading to a newer version of software before it may be due to the older version on your machine. Sometimes it is necessary to completely uninstall the older version to ensure the newer version works properly.
Uninstalling software in macOS is generally an easy straight forward procedure: locate an application by opening a Finder window, click Applications in the sidebar, then right click the applications icon and select move to Trash OR you can hold down the Ctrl key and click on the application icon and then choose Move to Trash from the menu that is displayed. Alternatively, you can also drag-and-drop an application’s icon to the trash can icon on your dock.
But what about applications that don’t have shortcuts such built-in system apps, and other random cases where the simple uninstall steps will not work as they may not appear within the applications folder? For example you will not find the Flash plug-in for macOS in the applications folder but in your System Preference panel. Here you will need to head over to Adobe’s website and search their site for the proper uninstall app for the version of macOS that you are running. There are many other plug-ins that fall into this category and the best solution here would be to search the software manufacturer’s website and follow their steps for proper un-installation. If you are not the user who originally installed the software, or your are not an admin user on your Mac, you will need to enter an administrator’s name and password to continue, so make sure you are an admin of your computer or know the username and password to the admin account before starting this process. When complete make sure you Empty Trash to fully uninstall.
Keep in mind this is different than a Windows machine. Apple’s macOS does not come with an built-in uninstaller tool listing out all your installed software (like add/remove programs in Windows Control Panel) and few vendors offer packaged un-installers with their applications for macOS, and generally they’re not necessary. This is because most applications are contained within themselves and don’t run background components or alter system settings files, unlike our lovely friend Windows, and leaving old preferences and support files on the hard drive generally doesn’t do much harm.
There are some instances where this is not the case and removing preference files, support items, and sometimes hidden files or kernel extensions are necessary especially when you are dealing with corrupt software installations that you are trying to reinstall and get working again. This is where the power of Terminal comes into play to assist us in the removal. This will be discussed along with a number of free software applications available to aid in uninstalling and cleaning up your Mac later in Part 2, the follow-up to this Tech Tails newsletter tip.