Fixing the "Spinny Beachball" (MacOS 12.7.6)

If you do not have a complete and current backup, try to get one of those backups now. While this is a possibility and far from a certainty, one of the causes of the spinning wait cursor (“beachball”) is failing hardware.

Then, please download and run (free) EtreCheck, and share the results to the clipboard. Then open a new reply here, and press the Additional Text button that looks like a printed page, and paste and post the hardware and software configuration report here. From that, we can get a little more detail about what is installed and what is running here.

A spinning beachball indicates the spp the cursor is hovering over is not processing events in its event queue (cursor movement info, clicks, keyboard input, etc…)

On older systems, with rotating hard disks, this is often because the disk is taking too long to read data, because it is performing excessive error retries, because the disk is failing.

It could also be network issues.

It could be an app, or apps consuming excessive system resources. This could be aggregated by 3rd party anti-virus or cleaning apps.