Severe lag and freezing after macOS Tahoe update on MacBook Pro M1

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Feedback - macOS - Apple

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Just upgraded a brand new MacBook Air M4 to MacOS Tahoe. The QuickTime Player playing video from local drive (Mac HD), video forward and backward with trackpad is extremely sluggish, half of the time none responding. Before it’s easy and intuitive to use trackpad to forward and rewind video while playing. Now the forwarding and rewinding on QuickTime is almost unusable.

PS. My 10 years old MacBook 12” on Big Sur doesn’t have this issue. Can play the same video and forward and rewind snappily.

I agree that it's not "the worst" but I am using a Mac mini M2; I'm not a heavy user at home and so a complete pointer freeze is a first for an OS, for me. The lag in text entry with something like Signal (which might be the cause of the problem based on what I've read) is so esoteric. I could go back to a previous OS but I would rather the issue was identified and resolved.

Sadly, the truth is that Tahoe is not Apple's best work. I have aMacBook Air M2 and have also experiences very slow boots, lags in performance, etc. still after installing the 26.0.1 upgrade of Tahoe. Furthermore, the suggestion that users should use a third party cleaner is not really accepting responsibility for the issue. If the problem was with machines that were far older, it might be reasonable, but if an OS upgrade causes such problems on a three year old machine that was operating smoothly and very rapidly one day, and plugging along the next day... well it is time for Apple to accept responsibility. And, if the functions offered by a 3rd-party cleaner is considered a requirement then it should be be part of the OS itself, or an Apple utility that is equally capable as 3rd party sources.

NorthernLakes314 wrote:

Sadly, the truth is that Tahoe is not Apple's best work. I have aMacBook Air M2 and have also experiences very slow boots, lags in performance, etc. still after installing the 26.0.1 upgrade of Tahoe. Furthermore, the suggestion that users should use a third party cleaner is not really accepting responsibility for the issue. If the problem was with machines that were far older, it might be reasonable, but if an OS upgrade causes such problems on a three year old machine that was operating smoothly and very rapidly one day, and plugging along the next day... well it is time for Apple to accept responsibility. And, if the functions offered by a 3rd-party cleaner is considered a requirement then it should be be part of the OS itself, or an Apple utility that is equally capable as 3rd party sources.

Do NOT use any third party cleaners! And anyone who might have suggested it is a m***n.

I guess I'm not a typical user either, Luis. I'm experiencing similar issues: Tahoe on a MacBook Pro M1 is noticeably slower. My suspicion is the Liquid Glass / Metal 4 is the root cause based on Apple's own comments of GPU intensive. What I have not noticed is a significant difference in app crashes. With every new OS I expect a few app glitches which vendors seem to fix quickly.

I've already taken steps to reduce motion via Accessibility options and with 26.1 reduce transparency. Neither appears to have had a significant impact. Safe Mode is not a realistic option for everyday use. I hope your answer was intended as sarcasm. Do you have other recommendations?

Same here. I need to move windows to another screen to make them respond again.

I have similar issue. Not the same as nico, but similar. When mac is under load, playing music or videos, the audio is crackling and breaking. Very annoying. Hope there will be a bugfix update soon...

FaceTime is laggy and iMessage spinning wheel is driving me to distraction. I'm not even playing music or videos. I'm in Word, have photos running, notes and apple mail. So tired of all the shiny sparky shenanigans. What's happening with my Apples?

Absolutely agree. Music app is glitching. This replacement of the playback bar from the top to the bottom of the app window is absolutely illogical (always difficult to fast forward the track and it is always gets mixed with the background. Moreover, there are hundreds of previously non-existent glitches in Music app itself (the first is that it now responds slow on MacBook Pro M3.

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This terrible experience appears to be shared by some, but not most users.

This begs the question, what is different?

For one thing, only very few Intel Macs are now supported, and those may be the most affected; macOS is bound to be geared more and more for Apple Silicon, and will all but assuredly drop Intel support completely very soon.

I sympathize with those afflicted, but more than likely it is a combination of older, slower hardware (intel macs can no longer be though of as "fast"), and probably old software, like system extensions from years back, that break with a new OS.

FWIW, there are certainly bugs, and that is par for the course for .0 version. Many people skip a new OS until version .2 or .3 because of it. But I do not concur with the description of Tahoe as "the worst", nor is it slow, on either of the macs that I have tried, or of many people which I know of.

im DONE with Mail. Apple made it really easy for me. I was already using a third party app for other email accounts. I started enjoying that experience more than Apple's Mail app. This just sealed the deal.

I've noticed the same problems after updating to MacOS26. My MacBook Pro M3 Pro became laggy when opening several apps, and sometimes everything just freezes, forcing me to restart the computer. When this happened only Mail, Messages and WhatsApp were open. Are there any solutions to this?

That's a quick fix but the auto fill and password key is not working now. I should have reviewed the bugs before downloading the Tahoe OS update. These challenges negatively affect productivity and business use. Apple developers should warn users of the potential challenges before making it available. Points to Apple products being user-centric and not great for corporate environments.

This is a huge mess… everything I do today beachballs… want to copy a line of text.. that will be a 2 second beach ball… want to reply to an email, 15 seconds of beach ball… open a file… whole system freezes for 10 seconds, beach ball, then maybe the file will open.

Mac Studio - M4 Max, 128 GB Ram, 2 TB HD