I installed Catalina 2 days ago and now my 2019 iMac is very slow, click to open an app, wait 4 or 5 seconds and nothing happens, then the spinning rainbow wheel of death appears for a few more seconds, then the app opens. This evens happens when opening System Preferences or Activity Monitor. I have restarted multiple times and the iMac has been left shut down for a few hours before restarting.
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Late 2013 21.5" iMac, 8 GB Ram, 1TB HDD. After update to Catalina 10.15.1, the thing was turning into a brick. Nothing worked, Office 365 took 3-4 attempts to launch and only did so after 10 minutes. Chrome, Firefox, Safari were crashing continuously. Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Lightroom, a nightmare. Performance was slow and buggy across the board. Wanted to throw the thing out of the window but, being stubborn, decided that no machine and some crappy software were going to beat me. The age of Terminator ain't not quite here yet. Started in Safe Mode, suddenly everything worked, like a gazelle compared to a Soviet agricultural tractor of the 1950s. It wasn't a matter of CPU or Memory usage, which were all well within the green. Here's what worked for me:
In System Preferences:
Turned off Siri, since I don't use it.
Turned off font smoothing and dynamic desktop.
Removed most of the extensions that I wasn't using anyway, almost 90% of them.
Turned off Notifications for all the things that I didn't care to know about in real time.
Made sure that there were no unneeded Login Items under the User and Group preferences (which in my case were none).
Changed the DNS servers in my WiFi connection to Cloudflare's faster ones (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1 and their IPv6 equivalents).
This improved things somewhat, but it was still not performing as expected.
Then:
Removed all the Adobe and Creative Cloud processes that were running in the background and prevented them from launching at login in the first place by deleting all Adobe launchers in HD/Library/LaunchDaemons, HD/Library/LaunchAgents and usr/Library/LaunchAgents. That did it. Restart, and suddenly everything worked. The Verifying App dialog now takes 2-3 minutes instead of an hour, Office 365 launches in 20 seconds, all three browsers launch in seconds as well. Adobe apparently is not yet fully compatible with Catalina and just messes everything up in the background. Will use GIMP for the time being. If I have to use Photoshop or Lightroom for some reason, will have to do a quick file cleanup afterwards - like cleaning up after your dog. Now the birds are out, the sun shines, and I feel like a better human being. Hope this helps!
it really helped me a lot... after updating to Catalina my MacBook was painfully slow...none of the apps were responding... word never opened.. Microsoft outlook crashed... PowerPoint was dead.. I was taking ages to login.. then I removed all extensions from chrome.. switched off all notifications... dynamic keyboard and smoother were turned off ,but when I run library/launch agents/com.adobe it made wonders... its much better now..my outlook is back..pdf word all working though not that fast it’s much better. Thanks again
My new iMac running Catalina was unbearably slow. Removing those Adobe launch agents fixed the problem. Thanks a million!
Get an SSD or more ram. That usually makes the apps faster to boot and for the Mac to startup. You can also try and disabling background apps that you don’t need enabled.
I saw the spinning wheel a lot yesterday. Applications seemed a bit laggy to open. I seem to be seeing this less with time and my Mac is feeling more "normal". I have a Fusion drive so another possibility could be that frequently used files are being transferred to the SSD side as they were before. I can definitely say things are improving with time.
i have a Imac 2019 with ssd and i have some problems too. the boot is very slow: it lasts 33s for the login screen, 42s for complete boot!!! before with mojave it took only 22s for the login screen and 26s for complete boot.
some apps became very slow; opening activity monitor for example needs 5 seconds and the spinning wheel appears.
the ssd become slow too: it lost 400-450Mb/s in reading speed!!
Yes Antivirus malware really slow things down . Think about it , they scan everything you open . I disconnected from the cloud and that sped things up . I sync my two Macs locally and my three iPads get synced and backed up when I bring them with in range of my WiFi. I depend on both time machine and a large external drive for backing up files.
I run malware bytes on my windows machine just because windows needs protection but it really slows them down too.
app cleaners are a waste and I believe antivirus programs caused more problems and provide false positives just to make you feel protected.
Case in point I have two windows machines that never get on the internet and have no connection to the outside. They just run a shared FileMaker data base. My boss decided we needed antivirus and had me install norton . It immediately said we had viruses. Now how can that be , it’s never (except to get a update from windows) connects to the outside ...
Yah, the old "SSD or more ram will fix it" advice. But it won't fix it. Even if it were to speed things up a bit, which I doubt, that still doesn't get at the core issue: There is something fundamentally flawed about the design of this OS version. The problem might be peculiar to certain CPUs or certain IO chips; if so, then the problem would affect older hardware very disproportionately. (Seems like Mac Mini with i5 CPU is suffering more than laptop with i7 CPU.) I don't know. What I do know is that there was a marked decline in responsiveness when Catalina was installed on my machine. And I'm not the only person reporting this. The spinning beachball is blocking progress way too often, for way too long. And this is happening while "Activity Monitor" shows load on disk is low, load on network is low, not much different about memory usage (versus pre Catalina). There do seem to be more incidences of processes hogging CPU, but this is not a necessary precondition for the spinning beach ball. In other words, whatever is causing the beach ball problem, it is not evident in the metrics of Activity Monitor.
Agree. You don't have a swap file active and memory pressure is in the green. Other place to check is disk tab for similar issues. You now need wiser minds than mine for this one!
Thanks, but as you can see I don't have music or anything much else running. I actually timed how long it took the Activity Monitor to open that time (sad, I know!) and it was 7 seconds.
It's like I've gone back in time 15 or 20 years to a time when everything was slower and took longer to happen.
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 fresh 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.
I have had a Mac since 1989 - the old Classic and System 6 - I can usually troubleshoot but not with Catalina, except for restoring the Dock.
I have tried everything apart from a clean install - reset the PRAM, reset SMC, run Onyx, run CleanmyMac but Catalina is still dreadfully, dreadfully slow on my iBook Pro.
You used to be able to rely on Apple but it is now the new Microsoft releasing buggy software with all their resources going into selling Apps., music and TV.
I agree that the Boot Speed is faster, but this update by absolutely no means addresses the larger issue. I used to be able to open 50 folders in the blink of an eye, now it literally takes 1 second per each folder, so now I wait almost a minute for this task that only took a few seconds previously. It's completely broken. I'm running on a brand new iMac also & have tested in Safe Mode & a brand new user with nothing running in the background. Exact same stupid results. This is completely unacceptable.
You're a star. After a week of problems I was about to throw my MacBook Pro out the window! Exactly the same symptoms as you had including the inability to shut down at all. After uninstalling Trend Micro it shut down and is now a rocket.
Thank you very much for sharing, much appreciated!
<Supposedly, you are not to install an outside or third party Antivirus software on a mac>
I spend half my life in SE Asia where virus protection is a must so please tell me where you got that information from.
Their statement was not accurate. Plenty of reputable sources, not only recommend, but also review antivirus/malware software that would be installed on an Apple computer.
https://www.macworld.com/article/3263722/best-antivirus-for-mac.html
https://www.techradar.com/best/best-mac-antivirus-software
https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/355173/the-best-mac-antivirus-protection
iMac slow after Catalina instal.
