How to get rid of default Mac OS apps like GarageBand
9 minute read Published:
GarageBand from Apple is probably an amazing program for people who love to listen to and create music. I don't, so I lately decided to get rid of these unused 1s and 0s on my disk. Turns out it is not as easy as it sounds since Apple does not like it if you tamper with the Mac OS experience they have in mind for you. Consequently, there is no official uninstaller. It is not too hard though to discover the files yourself and just delete them. Using GarageBand as the example, this post is about how to navigate the Mac OS file system and purge all traces of the Mac OS standard applications that nobody ever asked for.
tl;dr This post is about how to discover files on Mac OS for those apps Apple forgot to put an uninstaller onto the system. If you don’t care and just want to delete GarageBand right now, the short version is this: sudo rm -rf on the following list of directories should be all you need
/Applications/GarageBand.app /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/ /Library/Application Support/GarageBand /Library/Application Support/iLifeMediaBrowser/Plug-Ins/iLMBGarageBandPlugin.ilmbplugin ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.STMExtension.GarageBand ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.garageband10 ~/Library/Application Scripts/com.apple.garageband10 ~/Library/Application Scripts/com.apple.STMExtension.GarageBand ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd/Generated/com.apple.garageband10.help*10.2.0 ~/Library/Caches/com.