Brand New Macbook Pro M2 Max; Yet Sonoma Finder VERY SLOW!

I presume by the orientation and shape of the image, you took a picture of the Mac's screen with a smart phone? Somewhat irrelevant where it came from though.

Off the top of my head, I would be interested in seeing what is running. Download and run EtreCheck. It's a utility written by longtime, fellow forum member, etresoft. All personal identifying information is automatically redacted from its results.

When the app has finished, go the bottom icon in the left column and click on that to see the report. Copy and paste the full report here. You'll need to use the extra text button on the bottom of the editing window as the result is usually too long to fit in the main editing window. It's the third icon from the right, between the chain and landscape picture icons.

Thanks for the report. I don't see much you could do without. It appears your main work is video, photo and writing. Except for Box (on online backup system), there's little installed that doesn't have a purpose. Given your apparent leanings towards video work, I would presume the SteelSeries extension is for a microphone.

Keka is the only vague one as there's more than one title out there with that name. One is a file archiver (unnecessary as you can use the built-in .zip function). The other is for payroll software and analytics.

Beyond all of that, it's not a good sign when the Finder acts that way even in Safe Mode. Something appears to be faulty at the hardware level, because with those specs, your Mac should not be this slow. Bring it in to an Apple store and have them look it over.

I have one more idea, based on this comment in your initial post.

Finally, I got desperate, wiped everything, and started over; no difference.

Wiped is self explanatory. But what was entailed with started over? The main idea there being, did you do a restore back to where you were, with all third party apps and such?

If so, the issue could be you're dragging the source of the problem back onto the Mac. So another test (not fun, I know) would be to wipe the Mac again, let install the latest OS and stop. Then test its response.

Hmm, which brings up an idea, which is more of a test.

UmbergerBA, open System Settings > Siri & Spotlight. Click the Spotlight Privacy button to get here:

Drag and drop whatever drive your PDFs are on into the window to kill also all Spotlight indexing on that drive. Click Done.

Back at the previous Settings screen, uncheck PDF Documents.

Click the Spotlight Privacy button again and remove the entry for the drive the PDFs are on so it can index that drive again. See if that makes a difference in the Mac's behavior (it will take a little while reindex everything else on that drive, first).

Finder is a dawg with large file and folder hierarchies where it has to repaint those thumbnails during traversal.

Yes, that is also a major hit on response. I get that on my NAS when I open a folder loaded with TIFFs and JPEGs. The OS somewhat slowly draws one icon after another. Much faster from the same NAS in Ventura and now Sonoma, but still slow.

It's easy to see where a public library's worth of PDFs would drag the OS to its knees. That being the case, it would also likely greatly improve performance to turn off icon previews on all of those folders.

…always have a Time Machine backup taken just prior to handing it over to Apple.

Yes! Glad to see you fill in what I should have mentioned. Apple will often wipe a Mac so they can see how it operates with nothing else installed.

…storm of mdworker processes performing indexing and that can really hammer Finder or anything else wanting storage or cpu access.

That was my initial suspicion. But if the Mac behaves the same way even in Safe Mode, it seems there's something else going on. Though I just did a quick search, and yes, Spotlight does still run in Safe Mode. So if there's still a lot to index, being in Safe Mode won't change the Mac's behavior until it's done.

And with that many PDFs alone to index, any error updating the index will cause mdworker to never finish.

The OP has tens of thousands of PDFs in n-tuple folders. Finder is a dawg with large file and folder hierarchies where it has to repaint those thumbnails during traversal. If these are on iCloud, then one is at the mercy of the current Internet health and that can introduce additional variable lag to the equation. If any of these PDFs are on a non-APFS mounted drive, things go from bad to worse……

Yes, I saw that. As I stated, it's going to take Spotlight a VERY long time to index that many PDF documents, besides other items on the drive. Even on an SSD, that could take more than a day.

While Spotlight is chugging away, all other disk/drive access is going to lag.

Ah, okay. From what you noted in your initial post, I realized you were an experienced user. But we all forget things when you don't have to do them for quite a while, like waiting for Spotlight to finish on a new computer.

But with months of a continuing issue like that, then there sure seems to be something else going on.

Any junk software in the way, like anti-virus or a public VPN?

UmbergerBA wrote:

Nope. Nothing like that. I'm very picky about installing things that I really don't need.

Like "Box Finder Extension"?

And "Keka Finder Integration"?

And "OnyX"...?

What else don't you really need? Because I've lost count of the number of potential causes.

And if taken to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Center for assessment, always have a Time Machine backup taken just prior to handing it over to Apple. As far as Spotlight, it can unleash a ....storm of mdworker processes performing indexing and that can really hammer Finder or anything else wanting storage or cpu access.

Yes, I know what you said about your Intel Mac. An M1, M2, M3 Mac is an entirely different architecture. It's not going to work 100% identically to an Intel Mac.

Yes, I know what OnyX is. I've been using it for years. And I have never once mentioned it in this topic. You did in your initial post, but I haven't.

And yes, we're grasping at straws here. None of us can sit at your computer and try things ourselves. It doesn't make sense to me why it's this slow. I went from a 2018 mini with an Intel CPU to an M2 Pro mini, and the new mini is much faster at everything.

We realize you're frustrated, but there's a severe limit to what your fellow users can offer in a forum discussion.