Finder stopped working after macOS 14 update

Suzy2014 If you cannot print out and do not have a portable device, try doing screen grabs and print the screen grabs: SCREEN GRAB Press Shift ⇧ + Command ⌘ + 5 on your keyboard, then choose to capture your entire screen, an app window or a specific area.

If you have a portable device, copy the discussion link to your iphone and open the link when you arrive at apple store, so you can share it via AirDrop with your apple consultant.

Is your iMac still working OK? And when you say you searched for “applications” as a folder and clicked on the folder, did the finder and wallpaper start working? Did you have to repeat this every time you started up your iMac?

New M3Max MacBook Pro, 128gb memory, 4TB SSD. ($6k plus accessories; $7.2k with tax). Sonoma 14.3 Same issue (finder locks up unless iCloud Drive disabled). Asks for Apple ID repeatedly during setup. Seriously slow startup and shutdown times (Zero observable improvement over my Intel MBPro). Indexing ridiculously slow, and bogs things to a stop when trying to work on simple Word doc while indexing. Zero observable difference in speed to launch apps such as Word, Excel, etc. Apple seems to have completely lost its focus on the basic user experience. Even the ability to retain printer connections or plug in external monitors has become a chore. We can have spectral audio and rainbow news banners and woke films but struggle to get something that "Simply Works". Ahh Steve, where are you when we need you buddy?

Are we ever going to hear from someone from Apple on this issue? Its pretty massive, since many of us you Finder Open and Save panel on a daily basis. I bought the M2 Max for superior performance but I'm being held back massively by this oversight with Finder and Sonoma 14. So much time and effort is waster trying solve this Finder issue. Disabling iCloud isn't a responsible solution and also is only a band aid.

Hi Ciaranio I keep returning to this discussion hoping to hear a comment from apple to say it is fixed and updates to Sonoma 14.2.4 is ready. Crickets. We seem to be ignored even though this is the most significant problem I’ve seen in the 40 years since I started using Mac! So disappointing, I’m reverted to Ventura and will stay there as I rely heavily on Cloud for accessing all my calendar and contacts across several devices.

lisafromcanyonleigh , since Apple releases a new OS every year, I assume that resources are focused on that....

If they pushed out these releases less often, maybe bugs could be fixed.

Off the topic question: is there any way to see the posts in some order (e.g. last one first)? They seem to be all over the place and hard to find.

Suzy2014 One would think that Sonoma UPDATES such as 14.2.4 etc would prioritise the Finder error, although maybe they can’t fix it without releasing a complete NEW version eg 15.1. I too find the discussion replies difficult to find without tapping on the like button within the email I get, which effectively takes me straight to the comment. The content of this particular conversation is now over 9 pages long and so it is indeed difficult to find a specific comment! Perhaps when they invented this community chat they never anticipated such a lengthy discourse.

Steve626 thanks, I appreciate your thorough response and just wanted to ask if it is possible to change my external time machine drive to APFS format if it is already pretty full of data? Or do I have to wipe it and reformat again? How do I check what format my external drive is? Thanks in advance.

Steve626 thanks and I appreciate your explanation. I do have other data on the drive. But because I have retrofitted my new iMac with Ventura now and am not having any problems with my external drive or with iCloud, I think I will leave it setup as it is. I live in a rural area with limited satellite wifi. Changing systems take hours, and I just think “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” will have to suffice at this time. I have reported my problem to Apple Support, both in chat, and using the submit a bug field on their website. Hopefully eventually Apple will resolve the problem. I do feel that Apple should release operating systems that work universally with hard drive formats, and also with iCloud.

That's reasonable. I am wondering if your slow rural internet connection is somehow related to the slowdown as that would impact iCloud Drive sync. But sometime in the future you might consider upgrading all the external drives to be SSDs and APFS and then you might consider moving to the latest MacOS. But your setup sounds like it will work fine for quite a while.

Steve626, last year I bought a SanDisk Professional 2TB G-Drive ArmorATD - Rugged, Durable Portable External

Hard Drive HDD, USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 1 - SDPH81G-002T-GBA1D hard drive. I would like to use it for TM backups with the new iMac I plan to buy. I was told that it would be formatted the first time I plug it in for the format that the OS requires. Considering your post about external drives, is there an issue with Sonoma (or something else) that would cause problems if I used this drive for TM?

That drive will work well for Time Machine, Sonoma or other lower versions of the MacOS. My only concern is that the Time Machine backup drive should be 4x to 5x or more larger than the drive it is backing up. The drive you specified is 2 TB, you might want a larger drive unless your internal drive is 500 GB or less.

Thank you very much, steve626. I didn't realize that the size could be a problem.

The internal storage on the old iMac is 1.12 TB with 826 GB available and the old external TM backup drive is 2 TB, with 875 GB available.

The new iMac will have 1 TB storage. If the San disk 2TB drive is not big enough for the new iMac, I will buy a new bigger harddisk. Any suggested model to avoid any potential issues with Sonoma?

Well...that's sort of silly, Longhorn5570. If everything you described was actually the way that Sonoma worked (i.e. slow launch speed, slow indexing, repeated AppleID dialogue boxes popping up, inability to retain printer connections, etc), I would agree that "Apple seems to have completely lost its focus on the basic user experience". But as everyone who has posted here knows - and I assume that includes you - this is not the way that Sonoma is supposed to work. It's not normal behaviour, and it's clear that there's a BAD bug causing the problem. Apple hasn't lost their focus on the UX; they've just lost the ability to properly test OS software before releasing it. Perhaps "unleashing" it is more apt in this case. lol

Same issue happened after a forced upgrade from Monterey to Sonoma on a Mac mini 2018. Now, touching any Finder item – file, menu, whatever – brings up the spinning beach ball of death. It can take up to 30 seconds for that to stop.

Turning off iCloud drive did not fix the problem for me.

@Apple This is the most annoying bug ever in my more than 20 year history using Macs. Give it some love!!!