System freezes plagued my Mac for months. A simple fix finally solved it

Macworld

Ever since I installed macOS Tahoe on my M3 Max MacBook, it hasn’t been right. I’m not talking about Liquid Glass or window corner radii, or even the Apps Panel. For the better part of a year, my MacBook simply hasn’t worked the way I expect it to.

Some days are better than others, but at any moment, my Mac will freeze, with my trackpad becoming unresponsive and a spinning beach ball replacing my cursor. It only lasts a few seconds, but on the worst days, it happens dozens of times an hour and renders the trackpad completely unresponsive, as if my MacBook were shut down. Each occurrence lasts no more than a few seconds, but it’s enough of an annoyance to severely cut down on my productivity.

As I’ve written before, I knew what the problem was from the beginning. Activity Monitor showed a consistent CPU spike in the “core spotlight” task, followed by an immediate spike in the accompanying kernel. A restart temporarily helped, but the problem cropped up again before too long.

At first I thought it was related to indexing, but it lasted far too long. Then I waited for updates—26.1, 26.2, and so on—but none fixed the problem for more than a couple of days. As I wrote in my last article about the issue, turning off some of the toggles in the Spotlight settings helped for a while, but after a month or so, the problems crept back in. And since there’s no way to disable Spotlight completely without some scary Terminal tinkering, I was stuck with a Mac that didn’t work right.

Throw it all away

For whatever reason, the issue has gotten progressively worse over the past couple of months. It appears to be related to the installation of macOS 26.5, but it could also be related to the Apple Creator Studio version of Pages, which exhibited its own issues.

How it works is that Apple builds an occasional Spotlight index, which is what it uses to access files as you search for them. The Pages issue seems to stem from its use of iCloud as a storage drive. (I’m not alo…