MacBook Pro M5 slow and laggy (EtreCheck report attached)

The report shows Spotlight is using lots of CPU and is also likely responsible for the performance issues.

Try rebuilding the Spotlight index....keeping in mind it will slow down the system while the index is being rebuilt.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

You should also run Disk Utility First Aid on the drive as well as described in the following Apple article:

How to repair a Mac storage device with Disk Utility - Apple Support

Even if the First Aid summary says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any errors or warnings are shown. If there are any errors/warnings, then run First Aid again until they are gone. If after several scans the errors/warnings remain, then they cannot be repaired. The locations of the errors/warnings will determine how best to deal with them.

Uninstall NordVPN unless required by your organization to create a point-to-point tunnel to their network.

carlocesar30 wrote:

<EtreCheck report.log>

I have a MacBook Pro M5 with 24GB RAM and 1TB. Bought in November 2025 and experiencing very slow processing speed recently. Beachballing, not switching at normal speed between windows and apps, mouse en typing not responding without a lag. Also it gets quite warm quite fast. Here attached my EtreCheck report, can anyone help?

Full Disk Access may reveal more. No personal information is shown...

Runtime: 4:29 this is very slow, you would expect under 3 minutes run time.

<Bitwarden> I would uninstall this application and extensions even the report shows not loaded.

Uninstall all these:

< VPNs:

[Loaded] NordLynx - /Applications/NordVPN.app

[Loaded] NordWhisper - /Applications/NordVPN.app

[Loaded] OpenVPNTunnel - /Applications/NordVPN.app>

Note: Uninstall all third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus

all known to cause issues on the macOS

Run Etrecheck again and see if these concerning drive score changed after your efforts:

Performance:

    System Load: 6.26 (1 min ago) 6.69 (5 min ago) 6.40 (15 min ago)

    Nominal I/O usage: 161.08 MB/s ⚠️

    File system: 72.13 seconds ⚠️

    Write speed: 1615 MB/s ⚠️

    Read speed: 3446 MB/s

— "Nominal I/O usage" is huge compared to my M4 Pro Macbook Pro (0.18 Mb/sec)

— "File system" should be under 20-30 seconds on that new a computer.

— "Write speed" should be much closer to Read speed. I have the same data from the first M-series Macbook Pro in 2021 (M-1) and it did 3200 MB/sec both ways.

Hopefully the work you did fixed those scores.

BitWarden has a mildly evil name, but is a password manager.

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A virtual private network, or VPN, is a private connection over the Internet from a device to a specific network.  VPN technology is widely used in corporate environments. If you need to be "present" on an institutional network, a VPN is a great tool for accomplishing this. It is generally issued and controlled by the institution.

Almost all other uses are a SCAM. There is generally no need for you to have a private (and almost always MUCH slower) connection to a VPN vendor's Network, except to make it easier for them to harvest your data to sell. If you are behind a Router you control or Trust, there is NO security advantage whatsoever in using a VPN. Your connections are already encrypted in most cases.

If VPN vendors just stopped there, it would be bad. But many of these packages also insist on scanning all your files, non-stop, -- nominally looking for viruses, but who knows for sure what data they are harvesting. Their non-stop file reading punishes your computer's performance in the process.

Some also break into your other secure connections so they can be FIRST to examine your data, often leaving your Mac MORE vulnerable to attack.

What VPN service to use?

DON'T use VPN services

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29