My iMac is running horrifically slow since installing Catalina yesterday. Is there a way to resolve this? By slow I mean that every time I click on an application or try to do something the spinning beach ball appears. Every single time. It has really slowed down my productivity.
Have you tried restarting your iMac to see if that helps? It sounds like your iMac is busy performing some task in the background. The Activity Monitor is helpful to figure out what processes are keeping the iMac busy.
How to use Activity Monitor on your Mac - Apple Support
Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support
For me, the only solution was to go back to High Sierra. I have used Macs since the first ones, and definitely in the last few years, new updates are buggy, at the least. I use one for a work machine, and its just not acceptable for it to run slow. Windows PCs run so much faster, and seem much more polished now. Also, Apple seems to change things for no reason at all. They used to have this great screen capture program, Grab. Then it was gone with this other one in its place. It was horrible. It would gray out my screen and I had to reboot to eliminate it. Terrible. Apple, maybe stop working on all the new emojis, and spend some time getting your Mac OS working.
Lots of people have had this problem.
Try
https://www.techradar.com/how-to/macos-catalina-problems-how-to-fix-the-most-common-issues
Who suggested doing that? I called Apple Support also & that was not one of their suggestions. I tried everything they asked me to. My case was bumped up to their Tier 2 Support. Hopefully they have some answers, but they have to call me back. Great.
I also installed Catalina on my 2012 Mac after being harassed to no end by Apple with the box in the right corner that never went away. My computer is now virtually unusable. Spin, spin and spin and suddenly the battery is dying. I spent an entire day in the phone with a rep and it it still won’t work. I bought a the new MacBook with a limited budgets and I’m not impressed. This seems like a scam to make you go out and get a new computer.
I have a brand new iMac & it's just as slow, so I don't think it's a scam to force you to buy new equipment, but they seriously dropped the ball on the update. There's never been a major update that has affected my current system like Catalina has. It's just awful.
Thank you, yes unfortunately I have tried all the usual tricks but nothing has worked. Still get that blasted spinning beach ball with every action. My iMac is only a couple of years old as is pretty robust as far as features. This should not be happening. I also have a very fast internet connection. Appreciate the help though!
Correct. Thank you, but those don't address speed issues and the link they have for speed related issues are nothing new unfortunately.
I had the same problem. Make a backup then do a clean install. Then use the backup in the migration wizard to restore your accounts. This solved most of the problems. BUT I still have some spinning ball issues with a few programs that shouldn't be happening, but is.
edroch106 wrote:
Just installed Catalina and it slowed my mac significantly! Apple need to fix this issue!
All macOS upgrades feel slow at first. If you give it a day or so, the speed will pick back up. They did fix it by throttling back on the CPU usage for those upgrade tasks. Problem is, now they are going to take longer to complete.
Even after installing the Supplemental Update my iMac (5K, 27", 3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 64GB DDR4, 3TB Fusion) is still incredibly slower than when I was on Mojave. I mean I used to open like 50 folders in the blink of an eye & now you can literally watch each one open because they take about 1sec each now. It's painfully slow. I even installed clean with no 3rd party apps at all & it was still painfully slow. There are complaints all over the Internet about the speed. So far, everything I have tried has been futile. There is nothing in the Activity Monitor that's using abnormal CPU usage either making this issue even more odd. I hope they address & fix this soon.
Same here, talked to Apple support Portugal, and they have no clue. They suggested a safe boot. I did it. All the same again, even in safe boot.
Already did the usual stuff. Reinstall Xcode, from store and from xip file. Nothing works. For now my solution is to leave my iMac in sleep mode. I can't turn it off, or else it will take like an hour to become ready. It's not 4 minutes like you.
Catalina does the "Verifying Xcode", "Verifying ios10.3.simruntime", "Verifying ios11.2.simruntime" and so on... it takes about one hour. It's so frustrating.
Anyone with a solution?
Regards,
Nuno Simões
Backup. Format disk and do an Internet install of Catalina. Then restore with the migration program from backup. THEN it will take some time to figure itself out so don't turn it off for a day or so. You can always leave it in sleep mode or just leave it running. Power usage is minimal.
Hi, I have the same issue. I installed Catalina from zero, but my iMac (late 2012 edition) is working too slow. I didn't have this problem with Mojave. I spent today more than 1 hour talking by chat with the Apple Support. I did a Safe Mode restart, but the speed of the machine was the same. Then they suggested to create a new user. I did it, and the iMac worked fine with the new user session. And after that, when I started a new session with my original user, the iMac worked fine too, with a good speed response. But unfortunately, after a few hours, the performance went down again. So, I'm thinking now about going back to Mojave again. I hope Apple fix this asap.
Hi all, finally I have my 2012 iMac working on Catalina, but it took 3 weeks of phone calls and debug information sent to Apple Portugal and several hours of my time (and some of my sleeping time) to solve this problem. I believe this problem it's an issue with some upgrades from Mojave to Catalina, restricted to this two process's, XprotectService and syspolicyd, being in some kind of conflict with Xcode. Although Apple Portugal never gave a definitive solution neither the true nature of the problem, their support was tireless, and in the end they put me in the right direction to solve the problem.
The only thing that worked out was:
These were the steps that solve my one hour boot up of Xcode.
Catalina has slowed my iMac
