Now Complete For Mac

We’ve now released the full “Photos for Mac: A Take Control Crash Course,” previously available in an abbreviated early-bird version. It helps you transition to Photos, walks you through importing photo libraries, explains the Photos interface and how you can organize your images, gets you going with the editing tools, assists you with syncing to iOS devices, and looks at creating. If you want to have some fun this coming weekend pranking your colleagues or friends, there's now an Electron app with Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system that you can run on Linux, Mac,. Uninstalling an app on a Mac is so easy, you might not even realize how to do it: just drag the app’s icon from the Applications folder into the trash. How to Uninstall Applications on a Mac: Everything You Need to Know. Chris Hoffman @chrisbhoffman April 25. RELATED: How to Remove Malware and Adware From Your Mac. Macs are now.

Uninstalling an app on a Mac is so easy, you might not even realize how to do it: just drag the app’s icon from the Applications folder into the trash. But what about applications that don’t have shortcuts, built-in system apps, and other corner cases? This will cover most situations, but not all of them. This method leaves some junk behind, for example, but it’s mostly okay to leave it there. Some other apps may have different uninstall processes, too.

So let’s look at all the different things you need to know when it comes to uninstalling applications. How to Uninstall Most Mac Applications RELATED: Most Mac applications are self-contained items that don’t mess with the rest of your system. Uninstalling an application is as simple as opening a Finder window, clicking “Applications” in the sidebar, Control-clicking or right-clicking the application’s icon, and selecting “Move to Trash.” You can also drag-and-drop an application’s icon to the trash can icon on your dock.

Or, open the Launchpad interface and drag-and-drop an application’s icon to the trash can from there. Most applications will go straight to your trash, and you can then Control-click or right-click the trash can icon on your dock and select “Empty Trash” to get rid of that application and all the other files you’ve deleted. However, some applications will prompt you for a password when you try to move them to the trash.

These applications were installed using the Mac package installer. Uninstalling them will remove whatever system-wide changes they made. Note that you can’t remove built-in applications by doing this. For example, try to move the Chess app to the trash and you’ll see a message saying, “Chess can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by OS X.” How to Remove Left Behind Files The above method doesn’t actually erase an application’s preferences.

Erase an application and it will leave preference files left over in your Library folders. Most of the time, these files will use very little space and won’t cause a problem. The preferences will still be available on your Mac, too — this is convenient if you’re uninstalling an app only to replace it with a newer version of the same app, or if you reinstall the app later down the line. It’ll keep all your preferences from when you had it installed before. RELATED: If you absolutely must remove those files (say, if you want to ), you can use a handy app called to fully uninstall an app, along with all its extra files. Just launch AppCleaner, search for an application in its main window, and click on it, then click the “Remove” button in the popup window that appears. How to Uninstall Apps That Don’t Appear in Your Applications Folder But what about applications that don’t appear here?

For example, install the Flash plug-in for Mac OS X, or the Java runtime and browser plug-in for Mac, and neither will appear in your Applications folder. On Windows, that’s no problem — the Control Panel shows a list of all your installed programs, even ones without shortcuts. On a Mac, there’s no interface that lists all your installed software so it’s tough to even notice if you have this stuff installed. Some applications must be removed in other ways, and you’ll generally find instructions by simply performing a web search for “uninstall program name mac”.

For example, Adobe offers a separate uninstaller app you need to download and run to. RELATED: Oracle is even worse and doesn’t provide an easy app that will uninstall Java from Mac OS X for you. Instead, Oracle instructs you to run several terminal commands to uninstall Java after installing it.

Come on, Oracle — at least provide a downloadable uninstaller like Adobe does. Other software applications may provide their own downloadable uninstallers or uninstallation instructions, so perform a web search if you’re not sure how to uninstall something and you’ll find instructions. How to Uninstall Adware and Other Crapware RELATED:. The same free application download websites that serve this junk up to Windows users are serving similar junk to Mac users. On a Windows PC, most “reputable” adware provides an uninstaller that sits in the Programs and Features list, allowing users to easily uninstall it for legal reasons. On a Mac, adware programs don’t have a similar place to list themselves in. They may want you to download and run an uninstaller app to remove them, if you can even figure out which ones you have installed.

We recommend the completely free if you need to. It’ll scan your Mac for junk applications and remove them for you. How to Remove Built-in System Apps Macs also have no way to uninstall or install operating system features, so there’s no way to easily remove the many applications Apple included with your Mac. On OS X 10.10 Yosemite and earlier, it was possible to open a terminal window and issue commands to delete these system apps, which are located in the /Applications folder.

For example, running the following command in a terminal window would delete the built-in Chess app. Be very careful when typing the following command: sudo rm -rf /Applications/Chess.app As of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, System Integrity Protection protects these applications and other system files from being modified. This prevents you from deleting them, and it also ensures malware can’t modify these applications and infect them.

RELATED: If you actually did want to remove any of these built-in apps from your Mac, you’d have to first. We don’t recommend that. However, you can re-enable SIP after and your Mac won’t mind that you’ve deleted Chess.app and other built-in system apps. Really, we recommend you don’t do this. Mac OS X may automatically reinstall these applications in the future when you update the system, anyway. They don’t take up much space, and Apple provides no way to get them back beyond.

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My friend Julian Velard is a musician and a geek. But as hard as JV drives his MacBook Pro—and he does push it to its limits, using live audio plug-ins for his keyboards onstage–when the computer acts up, I’m the one he texts for support.

(Fair’s fair: If I can’t remember how to play a minor major seventh, Julian’s the one I call. We’re all experts in something.) When Julian called late last week, his MacBook Pro wouldn’t turn on; it would get stuck on the Gray Screen of Stomach Pain Inducement and never move forward. Over chat, phone, and then in person when he made the trek from Brooklyn to my New Jersey home, I walked JV through my steps for resuscitating a Mac that won’t start up. Let me share them with you too, since you may not have my number. Step 1: Run Disk Utility Recovery mode offers a number of useful troubleshooting options. If your Mac won’t boot, there could be many issues at play.

But the one I like to rule out right away—or repair, if possible—is any problem afflicting the hard drive. The easiest first step on that front is to run Disk Utility. On a Mac running Mountain Lion, you can run Disk Utility by booting into.

Make sure the Mac is off. (If it’s not responsive because it’s stuck on a gray, blue, or white screen, just hold down the Mac’s power button for several long seconds until it gives up and shuts off.) Hold down the Command and R keys, and power the Mac back up again. Eventually, you’ll end up on a screen headlined OS X Utilities.

(Once you see that screen, you can release the keys you were holding down.) Click on Disk Utility. Then, click on your Mac’s built-in hard drive in the left column of Disk Utility. (Usually, you’ll see two listings for your built-in drive: The first includes the drive’s size, like 500GB, in its name; and nested underneath it is your drive’s friendlier name. You want that second one.) On the lower right of the Disk Utility window, click Verify Disk, and then wait while Disk Utility does its thing. In Julian’s case, Disk Utility said that it had found errors and we ought to repair them. We clicked Repair Disk, and Disk Utility eventually claimed it had repaired some problems.

But Julian’s Mac was still misbehaving, so we moved on to step two. Step 2: Safe Boot Safe Boot limits what checks and functionality your Mac focuses on during startup, and performs certain diagnostics. It’s rare, but sometimes you can get your unhappy Mac to start up successfully with a Safe Boot, and then restart it normally, and everything returns to hunky-doryness. Shut the Mac down, and start it up while holding down Shift.

Safe Boot can take a while if it does indeed work. To get some feedback about what's happening, you might choose to start up while holding down Shift, Command, and V: That enters both Safe Boot and something called Verbose Mode, which spits out some messages about what Safe Boot is actually trying to do as it goes. Be patient during your Safe Boot.

If the Mac does start up, restart it from the Apple menu once the desktop finishes loading completely. If the Mac starts up normally, go on with your day. Otherwise, keep working through this list.

In JV’s case, his Mac wouldn’t restart normally following a successful Safe Boot. So, we moved on to the harder-core options. Step 3: Fsck for fsck’s sake This step is actually kind of fun—at least when it’s not your Mac that’s under the weather. It’s fun because it feels so geeky. Shut the Mac off, and start it up again while holding Command and S.

You’re launching Single User Mode. You can release the keys when the intimidating black screen with messages in white text appears. Wait until the command-line prompt appears, when all the text is done scrolling past. Then, you’ll type fsck -fy and hit Return.

Possibly for several long minutes. Eventually, after five different checks that take varying amounts of time, you should get to one of two messages: “The volume your Mac’s name appears to be OK” or “FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED.” If you encounter the first message, type reboot and press Return. If you see the latter message, though, you’ll want to run fsck -fy all over again. You can retype the command and hit Return, or press the Up arrow once and then press Return. Ideally, you’d eventually get to the “appears to be OK” message, type reboot, and find that your Mac now starts up perfectly. Julian’s Mac had other ideas.

Step 4: Reinstall Mountain Lion Remember OS X Recovery from Step 1? You can use it to reinstall Mountain Lion, too. Boot into Recovery mode, and then click to install Mountain Lion and follow the on-screen prompts. We tried that on Julian’s Mac, and after the whole installation process was complete, JV’s Mac did start working again.

Then, all the same problems started recurring: crashes, kernel panics, and eventually a failure to start up successfully at all. A brief but hugely important pause Long before this step, long before even Step 1 in fact, you should know the state of your backups. Julian’s state was that he didn’t have enough backed up. That’s a lousy state to be in. I’ve gone through elsewhere. Recently, we did a series of backup stories, including and This is the moment you'll wish you read those stories. At this stage in JV’s process, I was very concerned about his data.

During one of our successful bouts of getting the Mac working for a while, Julian signed up for the online backup service and copied over his most important files to a pair of external hard drives. But his failure to back up religiously made the trying Mac issues Julian faced not just a frustrating annoyance and time-suck, but terrifying, too. He could have lost hundreds of files representing thousands of hours of work. Step 5: Reset the NVRAM, because, why not?

In the PowerPC days, we talked about resetting the PRAM. On modern Macs, the real term is resetting the NVRAM.

The name refers to special memory sections on your Mac that store data that persists even when the Mac is shut off, like volume settings, screen resolution, and similar options. Resetting that data isn’t harmful, and quite frankly it’s also rarely genuinely useful. But man, at this point, it can’t hurt. You might need to grow an extra finger or two for this one, or have a friend help you out. Hold down all of these keys: Command, Option, P, and R, and turn on the Mac. Keeping holding the keys down until you hear the Mac restart again.

Apple says to let it restart just the one time; I usually listen for a second reboot, and then release the keys. In some cases, after performing this step, your Mac will restart normally. In other cases, if your luck is as bad as Julian’s was, you might instead see a progress bar on startup. If the progress bar fills up and then the Mac starts up, you’re likely good to go. In JV’s case, however, his Mac actually shut down at around the halfway point in the progress bar. It was time for Step 6.

Step 6: Make a Genius Bar appointment Julian and I went to my local with his Mac. We made one rookie mistake, which I’ll get to in a moment. We explained the problem in detail, and went over all the steps we’d already tried.

That was good. The Genius behind the bar agreed that it was probably a hard drive issue, and wanted to check to see whether the drive simply needed reformatting, or actually exhibited bad sectors indicating it needed to be replaced. While we were there, Julian realized he hadn’t backed up certain important files that had been on his Mac’s desktop. The Genius we worked with (Adam) could get Julian’s Mac to boot in Recovery mode, as we had, and we were able to copy the other files from it. But our mistake was that we’d left Julian’s external drives back home. So JV had to plunk down extra cash to buy a thumb drive at the Apple Store, onto which we then copied those other files. After consulting with a second Genius, Adam rendered his verdict: Because the drive wasn’t reporting any bad sectors, reformatting it and starting over would likely cure what ailed Julian’s Mac.

We returned to my house, fired up OS X Recovery again, and launched Disk Utility once more, choosing to erase Julian’s Mac completely. Then we reinstalled Mountain Lion again.

The Mac started up beautifully. Julian returned home to New York. Several hours later, as he restored his data from his backups, Julian’s Mac started behaving badly again.

Eventually it crashed hard, and again refused to start up. Double uh-oh. Step 7: Go back to the Genius Bar again Sometimes, even the best experts get it wrong. The new diagnosis for Julian’s Mac was that it was, in fact, a logic board failure, and not a fault with his drive at all. Apple took custody of JV’s MacBook Pro, and in a few days (and for nearly $300), the store will swap out the laptop’s logic board. So did we waste all our time with the earlier steps?

First, we managed to get Julian’s Mac usable enough to back up crucial data. That was probably the most important step we took. Second, all those steps ruled out numerous other issues; it was because of the freshly-wiped hard drive that the new Genius was able to conclude a logic board failure was to blame for JV’s Mac’s problems. Lessons learned So while our steps didn’t work this time around, that’s only in the sense of “actually solving the problem at hand.” They did help to ensure the safety of Julian’s data, and at least led us to the eventual answer. (Possibly, anyway. It could be that the logic board diagnosis is off-base, too.) But having these steps and awkward key combinations committed to memory, or saved to an iPad, or stuck on your refrigerator—that can make coping with your next Mac disaster considerably less stressful. Presuming your backups are current, anyway.