Again in September, when macOS 26 Tahoe arrived for obtain on my MacBook, I put in it together with tens of millions of different individuals. I didn’t give it a second thought—I’ve an M3 Max MacBook Professional with 36GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Working Tahoe shouldn’t be a difficulty.
But it surely was. Virtually instantly from the primary day I put in it, I skilled intermittent freezes lasting a second or two that might interrupt no matter I used to be doing. I couldn’t tie it right down to a single app, and it was troublesome to foretell. Some days it might occur quite a few occasions every hour, however different days it wouldn’t occur a lot in any respect.
I attempted all the standard methods—closing apps, restarting, shutting down—and naturally I instantly up to date to macOS 26.0.1, all to no avail. Since I don’t run betas on my important machine, I chalked it as much as an preliminary launch bug that might be smoothed out in 26.1. Alas, once I put in that replace as quickly because it arrived, the issue continued.
Again once I had an M1 MacBook Professional, I had points with reminiscence slowing down my machine, so I checked Exercise Monitor all through the day. Reminiscence strain was persistently within the inexperienced secure zone. There was one occasion the place my laptop fully seized up resulting from an utility reminiscence allotment difficulty, however once more, I couldn’t discover a particular trigger. I’ve loads of storage, loads of RAM, and haven’t had any points with a particular app. But my machine continued to freeze randomly, some days dozens of occasions an hour.
Shining a Highlight on the issue
So after macOS 26.1 didn’t clear up the difficulty, I made a decision to analyze additional. The whole lot appeared okay in Exercise Monitor, however I seen an abnormality within the CPU tab. Whereas the CPU LOAD chart didn’t seem to indicate any persistent points, two processes—corespotlightd and kernel_task–had been often utilizing over 100% of the CPU.
The corespotlightd course of was utilizing a ton of my accessible CPU proportion.
Foundry
I realized that every core counts as 100%, so technically, my MacBook may use 1,400 % of the CPU. Nonetheless, it appeared excessive for a background activity, so I stored a watch on it. Positive sufficient, corespotlightd was persistently utilizing nicely over 100% of the CPU load and typically reaching close to 200 %. I assumed that was unhealthy, so I went over to System Settings to take a look at the Highlight tab.
I don’t use Highlight all that usually, however once I did, it loaded shortly and didn’t present any apparent indicators of slowing my system down. However this specific activity’s title was clearly associated to Highlight, so I headed over to the Highlight tab within the Settings app. Inside, there are a sequence of toggles for every of Apple’s apps, system content material, and the Clipboard. However what stood out to me was the 2 on the high: “Present Associated Content material” and “Assist Apple Enhance Search.” Specifically, the second, which permits Apple to “retailer your Safari, Siri, Highlight, Lookup, and #photographs search queries.”
So I turned them off. And nearly immediately, my CPU load dropped. I watched the corespotlightd course of drop off my record of CPU proportion drainers, and the intermittent pauses stopped. I waited an hour or so, and it didn’t return, so I turned each toggles again on out of curiosity. It’s been a couple of week, and the difficulty hasn’t returned.
I’m unsure if my difficulty was particular to my machine, but when it’s one thing you’re experiencing, attempt flipping these two toggles within the Highlight settings. If that doesn’t work, attempt flipping the toggles for the person apps, significantly Pages, since some readers have indicated they’ve points with that specific app. It’d simply return your MacBook to regular.
