My MacBook Air m2 is too slow and sometimes it is lagging
Posted on Oct 6, 2026 5:37 AM
Posted on Oct 6, 2026 5:37 AM
Oct 6, 2026 8:14 AM in response to avneesh129
The report does not show any clear sign of an SSD or other hardware problem. The SSD reports 100% health, about 75 GB is free, and its read/write performance looks good.
That does not completely rule out a hardware issue, but there is nothing in this report that currently makes hardware the main suspect.
There are a few things worth watching, though. WindowServer, coreaudiod, and Preview were using significant CPU, and there have also been several application crashes.
The important point is that EtreCheck is only a snapshot. It cannot tell us whether any of these is actually causing the intermittent lag.
The best next step is therefore to open Activity Monitor while the Mac is actually slowing down.
Check both CPU and Memory, and see which processes are consuming the most resources at that moment.
Also note whether the whole Mac becomes sluggish or whether the problem is limited to one application.
A process using a lot of CPU is not necessarily a problem by itself; what matters is whether its activity coincides with the slowdown.
Apple explains these measurements in its Activity Monitor User Guide.
The EtreCheck snapshot shows about 3.91 GB of available memory and 0 B of swap, but those figures alone do not indicate a memory problem. Memory Pressure is the more useful measure.
It would also help to notice when the lag occurs—for example, immediately after waking, after the Mac has been running for a while, when opening files, or when switching between applications. That timing may help connect the slowdown to what Activity Monitor shows.
If the problem continues, Safe Mode is a useful diagnostic test. If the Mac behaves normally in Safe Mode, that would suggest that something loaded during a normal startup may be contributing to the problem. It would not, by itself, identify exactly what that is.
For now, I would not reinstall macOS, clear caches, or start removing applications. First, let's see what Activity Monitor shows during an actual slowdown and whether the problem is system-wide or limited to a particular application. If necessary, we can then compare normal operation with Safe Mode. That gives us evidence to work from instead of guessing at the cause.
This keeps the original technical conclusions intact but makes the explanation feel less like a diagnostic report and more like a practical conversation.
Originally posted at discussions.apple.com/thread/256371307