M4 Max MacBook Pro Is continuously freezing

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Level 1

12 points

M4 Max MacBook Pro Is continuously freezing

I have completely re-installed MacOS X several times. The system operates fine for a while and then starts to experience freezing as often as every minute. During that time, music or videos continue to play, the mouse can move, but all keyboard input is frozen and mouse clicks do nothing. When the computer unfreezes after 10 or so seconds any keyboard strokes during the freeze get applied. It happens when freshly rebooted, no matter how little or how many programs are running. There is no clear cause or change in system config. It happens whether connected to accessories or running as a bare laptop. The only major issue reported by Etrecheck is Spotlight consuming more than the usual amount of cpu:

corespotlightd 180.50 % (Apple)

Is this faulty hardware? Any help or suggestions are welcomed. Thanks so much.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.4

Posted on Mar 23, 2025 1:58 PM

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Answer 1

leon_t2f Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 24, 2025 2:29 PM in response to HWTech

Thanks for responding. I've identified the problem. It's described in the forum linked below. It's an issue caused by Seqouia where Spotlight is clashing with Pages. It's a pretty serious problem but I think it will require Apple to address it.

Continued corespotlightd process CPU over… - Apple Community

Do you have any other ideas of how this can be resolved? Thank-you so much.

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Answer 2

leon_t2f Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 25, 2025 1:59 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

My apologies. Here's a description.

Spotlight is consistently under load. Every minute or so, the system will freeze and begin to beachball. Any keyboard entry gets buffered during that time. The freezes can be seen in Activity monitor. When the computer beachballs all disk access is frozen.

The community post that I linked to seems to suggest that this problem is related to Spotlight trying to index pages documents. I can confirm that this problem get's worse when pages is open as Spotlight is constantly trying to reindex pages documents. But it can happen when pages is not open. I would assume that it is still linked with spotlight trying to index Pages documents.

I have completely wiped my Mac twice. The problem goes away for a week or two and then comes back. As mentioned, this seems to be an issue with Sequoia. I hope Apple releases a fix soon.

[Edited by Moderator]