System freezes plagued my Mac for months. A easy repair lastly solved it

Ever since I put in macOS Tahoe on my M3 Max MacBook, it hasn’t been proper. I’m not speaking about Liquid Glass or window nook radii, and even the Apps Panel. For the higher a part of a yr, my MacBook merely hasn’t labored the way in which I anticipate it to.

Some days are higher than others, however at any second, my Mac will freeze, with my trackpad changing into unresponsive and a spinning seaside ball changing my cursor. It solely lasts a number of seconds, however on the worst days, it occurs dozens of instances an hour and renders the trackpad utterly unresponsive, as if my MacBook have been shut down. Every incidence lasts no quite a lot of seconds, nevertheless it’s sufficient of an annoyance to severely minimize down on my productiveness.

As I’ve written earlier than, I knew what the issue was from the start. Exercise Monitor confirmed a constant CPU spike within the “core highlight” job, adopted by a direct spike within the accompanying kernel. A restart quickly helped, however the issue cropped up once more earlier than too lengthy.

At first I assumed it was associated to indexing, nevertheless it lasted far too lengthy. Then I waited for updates—26.1, 26.2, and so forth—however none fastened the issue for greater than a few days. As I wrote in my final article in regards to the concern, turning off a few of the toggles within the Highlight settings helped for some time, however after a month or so, the issues crept again in. And since there’s no solution to disable Highlight utterly with out some scary Terminal tinkering, I used to be caught with a Mac that didn’t work proper.

Throw all of it away

For no matter motive, the problem has gotten progressively worse over the previous couple of months. It seems to be associated to the set up of macOS 26.5, nevertheless it is also associated to the Apple Creator Studio model of Pages, which exhibited its personal points.

The way it works is that Apple builds an occasional Highlight index, which is what it makes use of to entry information as you seek for them. The Pages concern appears to stem from its use of iCloud as a storage drive. (I’m not alone in suspecting this both; certainly one of my Macworld colleagues skilled an identical concern with Highlight and Pages.)

Since there’s no solution to totally flip off Highlight as you possibly can with Siri or Apple Intelligence, I attempted a number of issues. First, I turned off the Pages toggle within the Highlight settings. That didn’t work. Then I attempted including the Pages app and its Doc folder to the Search Privateness choice in Highlight settings. No cube.

In a match of exhaustion, I even added my total MacBook drive to Search Privateness to forestall something from being searched and once more pressured Highlight to rebuild its index. That didn’t work both. Neither did macOS 25.5.1 or 25.5.2.

So I used to be caught. My plan was to attend till macOS 26.6 arrived and see if that helped (although after 5 earlier updates, I had little hope that it could), and maybe give the macOS 27 public beta a shot. In any other case, I might simply take care of the freezes and hope they didn’t get any worse.

Sadly, they did. It obtained to the purpose someday the place each time I clicked on a brand new window, my MacBook would stall for a second or two earlier than it let me do something. I used to be able to erase the entire thing and begin over—however first I made a decision to root round my Library folder.

I don’t know why I didn’t consider doing this earlier than. Principally, each app and have has related information that may be accessed when you discover the suitable folder. I couldn’t discover something apparent, however a fast Google search informed me the place they have been hiding: ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight. To seek out it, click on in your desktop, then the Go menu on the high, then scroll right down to Go to Folder, paste that complete string, and press Return.

Foundry

You’ll see a bunch of information and folders. Mine was stuffed with almost 10,000 information and over 2GB of knowledge. I had no concept the place the issue lay or the place to start, and didn’t actually care about breaking Highlight, so I dragged the entire folder into the Trash and chosen Delete Instantly.

Two weeks later, there hasn’t been a single freeze, pause, or stutter on my MacBook. I’ve even flipped the entire Highlight toggles again to inexperienced, and I nonetheless haven’t skilled any points. For the primary time since I put in Tahoe, I can lastly use it with out worry of freezing—simply in time to put in macOS 27. Right here’s hoping Golden Gate goes so much smoother.