Again in September, when macOS 26 Tahoe arrived for obtain on my MacBook, I put in it together with thousands and thousands of different folks. I didn’t give it a second thought—I’ve an M3 Max MacBook Professional with 36GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Operating Tahoe shouldn’t be a difficulty.
However it was. Virtually instantly from the primary day I put in it, I skilled intermittent freezes lasting a second or two that may interrupt no matter I used to be doing. I couldn’t tie it all the way down to a single app, and it was troublesome to foretell. Some days it will occur quite a few occasions every hour, however different days it wouldn’t occur a lot in any respect.
I attempted all the standard tips—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 essential machine, I chalked it as much as an preliminary launch bug that may be smoothed out in 26.1. Alas, once I put in that replace as quickly because it arrived, the issue persevered.
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 constantly within the inexperienced secure zone. There was one occasion the place my laptop utterly seized up resulting from an software reminiscence allotment challenge, 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 selected 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. Every part 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–have been recurrently utilizing over 100% of the CPU.
The corespotlightd course of was utilizing a ton of my obtainable CPU proportion.
Foundry
I discovered 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. Certain sufficient, corespotlightd was constantly utilizing effectively over 100% of the CPU load and generally 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 rapidly 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 #photos search queries.”
So I turned them off. And nearly immediately, my CPU load dropped. I watched the corespotlightd course of drop off my listing 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 few week, and the difficulty hasn’t returned.
I’m undecided if my challenge was private to my machine, however If it’s one thing you’re experiencing, strive flipping these two toggles within the Highlight settings. It would simply return your MacBook to regular.