Level 1

22 points

Entire System Freezes; Mac OS 26.2, M4 MacBook Air. - Solutions welcome.

Mac OS 26.2

M4 MacBook Air

I have been suffering with long pauses on macOS now for a year and it doesn't make any sense.

It manifests as a whole system freeze in the UI, but some userland and system events continue. For example, typing will stop on screen but as long as it's not too much, will catch up and write the text.

The trackpad will be completely unresponsive (showing this is a system issue)

This happens most often, I notice, when running Pages. But it also happens when not running Pages. Sadly I use Pages a lot.

Sometimes the cursor will disappear, sometimes I'm lucky enough to get the spinning rainbow ball.

When playing a movie, the screen will freeze but the movie will play on, causing me to miss 10 seconds of it.

This shouldn't be happening, obviously. I've reinstalled the system already once and it makes no difference. No process should be able to lock up the whole system like that in 2025.

MacBook Air 15″, macOS 26.2

Posted on Dec 23, 2025 12:27 PM

Top-ranking reply

Paul Downie

Level 1

27 points

Posted on Jan 1, 2026 4:44 AM

I’m using Tahoe, myself: and having the same issues.

The freezing and overheating seemingly caused by running Pages with anything else — is showing up in Activity Monitor as corespotlightd and kernel_task chewing up lots of resources.

A Google search for ‘corespotlightd’ suggested I clean out the folders in ‘~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight’.

IE, clean out the contents of all the folders.

Manually!

Then restarting.

When I restarted my machine, I immediately logged back in, opened a LOT of Pages files, and recorded a video.

Which was what I was having problems with, when I posted my original questions.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256204342?answerId=261766958022

That recording seems to have gone well, as this *seems* to have cleared the issues: I’ll post more, if, as and when …

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45 replies

Owl-53

Level 10

103,219 points

Dec 26, 2025 1:58 PM in response to mjohnstn

mjohnstn wrote:

steve626 wrote:

I do not understand why the original poster actually posted here in the first place with "solutions welcome" when they resist any suggested steps towards troubleshooting, refuse to show how their Mac is configured, and purport to know what is wrong anyway.

I came for support but what I got was the usual Mac Voodoo. Oh, it might be hardware, oh it might be your VPN.

I'm guessing you absolutely do it for ego - whereas I've been supporting Macs for years in the real world. I don't know why you need to be so passive aggressive about it.

Sorry, I prefer a more consistent approach and, no, I don't trust random people with random software.

When the OP noted that booting from an external USB drive eliminated the freezing issues, that is consistent with user-installed software causing the issues but it does not rule out faulty hardware (cf Owl-53) since some internal SSD drive circuitry is bypassed or used differently when booting externally.

It allows the removal of most doubt. So far, he system has been working like a champ. The solutions in that other thread worked, while EtreCheck, sure, it's fine. But it doesn't do much more than anything I already know how to do.

I left this in this way (with the freezes) because the iPad Pro is my usual writing desk. I've since moved to the Mac again. So the problem frustrated me enough to do something about it. So I created a thread and then went searching for solutions.

If you're not interested in actually helping, then leave the thread. Ignore it. I'll posting further updates every couple of days for documenting the progress.

FYI and not that this will matter

This Ship has left the Harbour

Dec 26, 2025 2:42 PM in response to mjohnstn

I'm running a MBA M2 2023 w Sequoia 15.7.3 and I recently began to experience symptoms similar to yours; system freezing and hesitation. I also experienced an unusually quick reduction of free space over a period of a couple weeks since applying the latest Sequoia update. Activity Monitor showed that corespotlightd was eating CPU cycles to the tune of ~250% at these moments. I typically run the Pages app with several docs opened from my iCloud drive.

I followed you down this "rabbit hole": Continued corespotlightd process CPU over… - Apple Community and found that my /Home/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder had eaten about 60GB of storage.

I read that thread and followed the suggestions regarding the /Library/Metadata folder and its contents and after deleting that and rebooting was pleased to discover that I'd regained 50 GB of storage.

In addition to deleting the /Metadata folder contents ,I downloaded my typical Pages docs from iCloud to my local Documents folder and have begun to operate that way for the time being.

I'm happy to tell you that my Mac's symptoms have disappeared, knock wood. I've only done this within the past 24 or so hours, but I'm cautiously optimistic that this combination of actions has put a check on the issue. 🤞🏽

I'll be looking forward to any updates you may post here in the near future.

I wish I could put a finger on why corespotlightd trips that CPU overload, but I cannot. It's gonna take someone with more knowledge than I to do that. Hopefully Apple can provide a fix or at least more insight before long.

Meanwhile, I'll be following along here.