9to5Mac58%
Mac beach balls and unresponsive trackpad? This fix seems to work 77%
By Ben Lovejoy74%
7/20/2026, 11:34:31 AM
Keywords: Mac, Macos, Beach Ball, Trackpad, Unresponsive, Fix, Activity Monitor, Spotlight, Corespotlight
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 35.7% saturation with 140 hits. Analysis detected 1,039 faulty-reasoning hits from 392 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 69.5% and a BS Rank of 77% (4,414 of 18,815 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 76.50% of the article peer group.
There have been growing complaints about users experiencing beach balls on the Mac when running macOS 26.5, with some also saying that their trackpad becomes completely unresponsive for several seconds at a time.
Activity Monitor typically reveals three culprits, and there does now appear to be a reliable solution to the problem …
I last month highlighted the issue, speculating that Apple Intelligence photo scanning might be the cause.
Checking Activity Monitor typically reveals high CPU usage with one, two, or three processes.
One process was variously using anything from 50% up to 150%: mediaanalysisd.
Googling this found a number of users complaining about the same issue, with others seeing high CPU usage also for kernel_task and corespotlightd.
Michael Simon also fell victim to this.
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.
He tried a number of unsuccessful approaches before finally finding one that works: deleting the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder.
That of course means that the Mac has to rebuild Spotlight, but he says two weeks later the issue hasn’t returned.
My own experience is limited to less than a day, but I too have so far found no recurrences of the issue.
If you are happy to wait for your Spotlight data to be rebuilt, here’s how to delete the data:
Open a Finder window
From the Go menu select Go to Folder…
Paste in: ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight
CMD-A to select all and then right-click any item and select Move to Trash/Bin
Right-click on the trash can and select Empty Trash/Bin
Confirm when prompted
If you’ve been experiencing this issue, please let us know in the comments whether this also works for you.
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Analysis
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