Caveat: if you are updating to #macOS 27 there is this lovely fscking Apple Stupidity "feature" which starts quantising *all your disk* so that Spotlight can give you "better answers". It has been going for over 24hrs for me and it is at 7.1% … the I/O is floored and you simply cannot run any I/O intensive tasks (e.g. Parallels). To find out the state of affairs you can use: plutil -extract SpotlightKnowledgeV2.embeddingGenComplete raw ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlightknowledge.plist | awk '{printf "%.1f%%\n", $1 * 100}' Whoever at #Apple thought this is up is a complete and utter cretin, especially because it is clearly running with a high priority and takes over all disk I/O. I still have not found a way to stop it so I can actually do some work. Update: figured out a fix… note that it blocks Apple Stupidity as a side-effect: UID=$(id -u) # Disable Apple Intelligence search daemons launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.assistantd launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.assistant_service launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.assistant_cdmd launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.siriknowledged launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.siriinferenced launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.Siri.agent # Disable system-wide AI search components sudo launchctl disable system/com.apple.contextstored sudo launchctl disable system/com.apple.modelmanagerd # Stop the running hybridsearchd process immediately sudo launchctl bootout gui/$UID/com.apple.hybridsearchd 2>/dev/null || true sudo pkill -9 hybridsearchd 2>/dev/null || true