@grgarside Thanks - at this point, there's not much to do until the user self-deletes or contacts the team to delete.

In general, you can point users requesting deletion to this page apple.stackexchange.com/help/deleting-account

@BartArondson The answer is both. In areas where code does more, things have to slow down. In other areas, code was removed and things are faster.

@bmike, I'm not sure I understand. What is an example of a function in the OS where code does more?

@BartArondson here are two: sandbox requirements can affect apps that read / write and are not updated. Spotlight data detectors process all writes to disk, so if an app writes data that are rush in metadata or call a slow processor, then the overhead can be benchmarked, noticed.

Here's another. System logging, package receipts are all using sqlite database files for much of the writing. If you never log a single message, then that overhead is wasted.

However, if you have thousands of log messages a second, the efficiencies of a database could make the processing of messages far more efficient than the old syslogd manner.

All sorts of system level abstractions have been introduced steadily - so based on where someone's bottleneck lies - the changes could be better, worse or a mix.