Finder and Desktop slow to load after logging in

I have same problem on a 16 GB RAM Intel Core i7 late 2012 Mac Mini, a 2013 Macbook Air 13 with 8 GB Ram, and an Air 11 4 GB Ram, and a 27 inch late 2012 iMac 27 with 24 GB Ram

Leading me to believe this is the case with all Macs, and that it is an iCloud Issue or just how slow the new OSX is since El Capitan.

To be honest, the Apple Loading bar when booting up, also takes about 2 minutes to load, in comparison to the old OSX which took about 8 seconds, and even had lots of videos on youtube showing how fast a Mac boots compared to Windows. But now, to be honest, with or without our problem of slow finder and slow desktop loading, Apple devices all take 5 times longer than any Windows device to load these days, and thats a fact.

I definitely wonder as to why all my devices have the same problem. It shouldnt take more than 30 seconds from pushing the on switch to using desktop. I think OSX Capitan and Sierra are just twice as much code as before, and it is just too heavy for the older machines to deal with.

Either way, all my devices, and all of those of my friends, are experiencing precisely the problem mentioned here.

I have tried all solutions, including total format and factory resets on all devices.. doesnt change a thing

Your terrible experience is by no means normal - though I certainly understand that if you see that slowness in all of your machines, it may lead you to believe it is like that on all machines.

I can say emphatically that is NOT the case.

Do you have an assigned startup disk? Looking for a startup disk is one thing that can make the startup time grow significantly.

I also wonder if all of those machines have similar software installations. If you, as I, tend to migrate stuff from one mac to the next then it is possible that some problems have come along. You might post an Etrecheck report, which might help by letting us have a notion of what software is installed. Some red flags like antivirus or "cleaners" might pop up.

I was clearing some of the auto-login processes on my MBP. When I removed EEventManager from the startup and rebooted, that's when it took a half-minute for the desktop to populate. I had read in the Apple support notes that EEventManager was the Epson scanner software, looking for the scanner on the network.

I have an iMac 27 24 ZGB Ram core i5 a Mac Mini core i7 with 16 gb ram and a macbook air 2013

all do the same thing as your mac is doing (slow desktop, menubar and finder load.. safari too)

The only thing i could find that speeds it up a bit, is to remove icloud stuff such as mail and notes. I have thousands of notes in my notes app in the cloud, which, along with mail, eat up about 3 gb of cloud storage. As soon as i add my icloud accounts to the mac user account, things get slow.

I noticed my Mac computers got slow and icloud issues when Apple changed to icloud drive. In fact, there are some shared photo folders in the stream which cant be deleted by me the owner.. all pre-icloud drive uploaded files are non writeable by me the owner now, nor are they downloadable on an iOS device from the shared folder.

Anyway, if i dont add my apple id and cloud accounts to the settings of the user id on the Macs i use, then everything loads in about 45 seconds. Otherwise im sat for about 4 minutes to see mail and safari

i had to remove iCloud tabs from safari too. I own about 10 devicesso the cloud goes mental when they are all connected to notes, mail etc.

Try removing all your icloud connections and load the user without apple id - if it loads fast, then its not a hardware problem

I believe the problem is iCloud based

A fried has the same problem with the newest MBpro 15 with an SSD, it is eeven worse than here with 8 MB and rotations (that I like very much because you can hear in such situations that still something happens).

I agree that RAM doesnt change anything. I have a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16 GB DDR3 RAM on a Mac Mini from Late 2012 in El Capitan

I would say it is an El Capitan Problem because its the same on my Macbook Air, Mac Mini, and iMac 27 (which has i5 and 24 GB RAM)

All devices take at least 2 or 3 minutres to stop the beach ball if loading desktop, or trying to click on the apple icon. Clicking on an app fir first time like Safari also takes about 20 seconds to load

I think this may be a problem of BIG DATA. if we look at a 16 GB RAM pc 5 years ago, the Data it had to process was about a 20th of what is currently required. These days, operating systems try to connect with many files and websites to process all sorts of data, and we are currently in an age where a website like Facebook can actually slow down a 24 GB Ram i7 Processor with one single safari tab open. And so we have now returned to an age where the computer cp is not powerful enough to process all the masses of Data a modern OS uses, as well as Internet webpages and apps too. Facebook eats up 40% of cpu if use activity monitor to watch it when open in a browser tab

Thats40% of a 16gb RAM i7 CPU eaten up by one browser tab with Facebook.

No wonder PCs with high powered RAM are still struggling with a beach ball

These days, 16 GB Ram is like 128 MB Ram was 10 years ago.. namely Puny.

El Capitan is anyway a total Mess as everybody knows, but Sierra isnt something i plan to install, because 1. Mac Mini doesnt have Siri (no Microphone), and 2. It uses even more memory than El Capitan and 3. I decided to not update after el Capitan removed the 'zoom text only' option from Safari (a feature i used all the time).

I am convinced that an update to Sierra will just make things worse. For me i would like to have Mavericks back as that was the only OS which worked well for me. The new OS dont have more productivity features, just social networking and silly features for content consumption and social networking, but nothing for serious professionals into content creation

The appstore still has the same boring apps from 2012 (aperture, logic x, keynote etc) which dont ever get updated, and the Mac OSX app store is as barren as the windows mobile appstore.

I have tried starting up a new Macbook in a store here in Thailand and it also took about a minute and a half to open desktop and stop beach balling. So i would assume that the mac is no longer faster than a windows device to startup. It seems the Mac is now a slow beast by nature, but that older macs and expecially those with El Capitan more than others, will be incredibly slow.

Otherwise maybe we both have a worn out hard drive? if so then thats the case on all my devices

I tend to think that its just that Mac OSX doesnt really work well anymore, and it lies with the OS itself, not the device

Thailand Amulets wrote:

I have tried starting up a new Macbook in a store here in Thailand and it also took about a minute and a half to open desktop and stop beach balling.

Then there's something wrong with it (as there often is with floor models). My MBP takes less than 30 seconds to start up. There is also a noticeable difference in speed with the machines with solid state drives.

Logic X has been updated several times, as has Keynote (and so have Pages, Numbers, iMovie, Final Cut Pro...).

They are actively being developed.

Aperture is no longer sold, as was publicly announced some two years ago or so.

Very good point about SSD.

Two things to consider are:

1) Recent versions of the OS pretty much fly on macs with an SSD, but are slow as molasses if the mac has a rotating HD.

2) In machines that are 5 or 6 years old there is a distinct possibility that the HD may in addition be starting to fail, and one of the first common symptoms of that is very slow response, as sectors fail, etc.

This is normal behaviour for Yosemite for users with FileVault enabled (i.e. Your Mac's primary disk is encrypted).

The authentication process is done earlier because without authorisation from the user the OS cannot access the rest of the disk.

This is a good thing, and I think you are (mostly) mistaken that it takes longer to boot up — since now you are watching the screen and waiting after entering your login/password the result is that one fixates on the screen and the time it takes to present the OS X graphical user environment, and comparing it with your prior experience of how much time it took to go from authentication to the GU environment. But the total time from power up shouldn't be noticeably longer.

To disable this behaviour:

Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault

From there you can click on the 'Turn off FileVault', after which you will be asked to restart and you will have the normal boot up behaviour and the OS will start to decrypt your disk in the background.

EDIT: The 'extra long' boot time with FileVault occurs once only, at the first startup/restart after enabling FileVault as the OS is finishing the process required. After this, it should be as fast as normal. I double-checked this whole process by disabling FileVault and re-enabling it on one of my machines so I could be sure.

The only "other idea" I can think of, is a hardware issue – possibly with the hard disk, especially since Safe Boot and a different User account give the same (slow) result.