System freezes plagued my Mac for months. A simple fix finally solved it

Ever since I installed macOS Tahoe on my M3 Max MacBook, it hasn’t been right. I’m not talking about Liquid Glass or window corner radii, or even the Apps Panel. For the better part of a year, my MacBook simply hasn’t worked the way I expect it to.

Some days are better than others, but at any moment, my Mac will freeze, with my trackpad becoming unresponsive and a spinning beach ball replacing my cursor. It only lasts a few seconds, but on the worst days, it happens dozens of times an hour and renders the trackpad completely unresponsive, as if my MacBook were shut down. Each occurrence lasts no more than a few seconds, but it’s enough of an annoyance to severely cut down on my productivity.

As I’ve written before, I knew what the problem was from the beginning. Activity Monitor showed a consistent CPU spike in the “core spotlight” task, followed by an immediate spike in the accompanying kernel. A restart temporarily helped, but the problem cropped up again before too long.

At first I thought it was related to indexing, but it lasted far too long. Then I waited for updates—26.1, 26.2, and so on—but none fixed the problem for more than a couple of days. As I wrote in my last article about the issue, turning off some of the toggles in the Spotlight settings helped for a while, but after a month or so, the problems crept back in. And since there’s no way to disable Spotlight completely without some scary Terminal tinkering, I was stuck with a Mac that didn’t work right.

Throw it all away

For whatever reason, the issue has gotten progressively worse over the past couple of months. It appears to be related to the installation of macOS 26.5, but it could also be related to the Apple Creator Studio version of Pages, which exhibited its own issues.

How it works is that Apple builds an occasional Spotlight index, which is what it uses to access files as you search for them. The Pages issue seems to stem from its use of iCloud as a storage drive. (I’m not alone in suspecting this either; one of my Macworld colleagues experienced a similar issue with Spotlight and Pages.)

Since there’s no way to fully turn off Spotlight as you can with Siri or Apple Intelligence, I tried a few things. First, I turned off the Pages toggle in the Spotlight settings. That didn’t work. Then I tried adding the Pages app and its Document folder to the Search Privacy option in Spotlight settings. No dice.

In a fit of exhaustion, I even added my entire MacBook drive to Search Privacy to prevent anything from being searched and again forced Spotlight to rebuild its index. That didn’t work either. Neither did macOS 25.5.1 or 25.5.2.

So I was stuck. My plan was to wait until macOS 26.6 arrived and see if that helped (though after five previous updates, I had little hope that it would), and perhaps give the macOS 27 public beta a shot. Otherwise, I would just deal with the freezes and hope they didn’t get any worse.

Unfortunately, they did. It got to the point one day where whenever I clicked on a new window, my MacBook would stall for a second or two before it let me do anything. I was ready to erase the whole thing and start over—but first I decided to root around my Library folder.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this before. Basically, every app and feature has associated files that can be accessed if you find the right folder. I couldn’t find anything obvious, but a quick Google search told me where they were hiding: ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight. To find it, click on your desktop, then the Go menu at the top, then scroll down to Go to Folder, paste that whole string, and press Return.

You’ll see a bunch of files and folders. Mine was filled with nearly 10,000 files and over 2GB of data. I had no idea where the problem lay or where to begin, and didn’t really care about breaking Spotlight, so I dragged the whole folder into the Trash and selected Delete Immediately.

Two weeks later, there hasn’t been a single freeze, pause, or stutter on my MacBook. I’ve even flipped all of the Spotlight toggles back to green, and I still haven’t experienced any issues. For the first time since I installed Tahoe, I can finally use it without fear of freezing—just in time to install macOS 27. Here’s hoping Golden Gate goes a lot smoother.