Am I the only one with constant spinning wheels, frozen pointer, and constantly lagging typing?
If Apple "improves" the Mac any more, it will be a door stop.
I have a 2020 Air with an M1 chip. I grant that's old and perhaps obsolete at this point. I wish there were a way to go back to an earlier OS. My much older Mini, which has not updated to the most recent OS, still works fairly well.
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 26.5
I just updated my M1 MacAir to Tahoe 26.5, and it's still a powerful, fast, lovely device. Mine has a 1TB drive.
It's very important that the drive not get more than 85% full. If you have less than 15% free storage, then the first thing you need to do is clean that out.
If you're running a VPN or "Cleaning" apps or "Virus catcher" apps, you should purge those immediately. They are known to slow down a Mac, corrupt files, and offer little or no value.
Check Login items-- apps will add stuff and have your Mac doing things for them without your knowing.
Turn off the internet and see if things speed up.
See what happens if you boot into Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this:
Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
You can also see this:
If your Mac runs slowly - Apple Support
I just updated my M1 MacAir to Tahoe 26.5, and it's still a powerful, fast, lovely device. Mine has a 1TB drive.
It's very important that the drive not get more than 85% full. If you have less than 15% free storage, then the first thing you need to do is clean that out.
If you're running a VPN or "Cleaning" apps or "Virus catcher" apps, you should purge those immediately. They are known to slow down a Mac, corrupt files, and offer little or no value.
Check Login items-- apps will add stuff and have your Mac doing things for them without your knowing.
Turn off the internet and see if things speed up.
See what happens if you boot into Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this:
Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
You can also see this:
If your Mac runs slowly - Apple Support
are you using any apps that claim to "clean up" or "speed up" or otherwise "optimize" your Mac? and / or any antivirus apps? the only thing those apps are good for is causing major issues within macOS while providing ZERO protection or benefit. you would do well to uninstall them.
If you have no such apps, i’m thinking you should download and run the free version of EtreCheck so we can see if you have some software installed that is causing your issue. make sure you give "full disk access" to etrecheck. Learn how to use it by reading Using EtreCheck. if you need help interpreting the report, you can see how to post the report here by reading How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report. and it automatically obscures sensitive things (like serial numbers) so you don't have to worry about sharing the report here.
Update: I was seeing notifications of logd(?) overload. I looked that up and found a couple of ways to deal with it. Restart was not working so turned it off with Activity Monitor. So far, that seems to have done it.
For anyone's information, my solution was to back up the Mac, erase the drive and reinstall the system software. Problem solved.
I'm at 77% storage capacity, most of that for the system. I save everything I can to iCloud. No cleaning or virus catcher apps that I know of. I checked login items recently and there was only two, and I removed one (Zoom). I try minimizing open apps and windows.
This happens just about every time Apple makes a significant change to the OS. After a few weeks it sorts out for the most part. Right now, I can expect to type a few sentences or less before I have to wait half a minute or so for it to catch up and allow more. Scrolling freezes almost every time. Moving the cursor has become a bad idea.
I'll try your suggestions and report the results.
Thanks for the input.
PS: This reply would not post on the first try. So it goes.
I'm glad that worked! It was almost certain to. I'm sorry, though, that you didn't find the cause--it might happen again.
You said "This happens just about every time Apple makes a significant change to the OS." However, now with the same OS, you're saying things are working. This doesn't happen to most of us, so if it comes up again, it will be important to examine what's changed. Keep in mind the things that were suggested here for helping to analyze the situation.
MacBook Air (M1, 2020) slow, freezing issues
