Macs with Tahoe and Golden Gate are no longer reliably quick and stable for daily use

Runaway processes and low free storage space are common reasons for Macs to run slow / beachball. 

It is possible there are processes running in the background that are using significant resources. Check Activity Monitor, CPU tab (sort by % CPU) and Memory tab (sort by Memory) to see what's running hard. Make sure that View menu > All Processes is selected, so you are seeing everything.

Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

Confirm that you have sufficient free space on your internal storage. The absolute minimum is ~30-40 GB free space, and as a rule of thumb you should aim to have 15-20% of your total internal storage as free space. You can check the amount of free space you have on your Mac in a variety of ways:

Select your internal drive then click File menu > Get Info, check Available space

Go to System Settings > General > Storage, check the graphical display at the top of the settings pane

In Disk Utility (in Applications > Utilities), by selecting the main container disk below the drive itself (you may need to select View menu > Show all devices to see it)

In the System Report – hold the Option key and click the Apple menu > System Information (the top menu item), look for the name of your internal drive (Macintosh HD, unless you have renamed it as I did)

Note that on versions of macOS prior to Golden Gate, the ‘available’ space reported with the first two methods above was greater than the ‘free’ space reported by the second two methods. Apple corrected that confusion with Golden Gate, and as shown in the above screenshot, the available/free space is consistent across the different methods. For more details, see this User Tip.

Some steps to take to safely free up space:

Free up storage space on Mac - Apple Support

Optimize storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

How to free up ‘System Data’ and other st… - Apple Community

If nothing in the above reveals an obvious culprit, then appropriate troubleshooting steps are Safe Mode and creating a new user account to test. 

See if the problem is present when you boot in safe mode. That process performs some system cleanup and clears caches, and also disables 3rd party extensions that may cause problems.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

If that does not correct the issue, test in a new user account. A newly-created user account will have all settings at default, and if the issue does not occur in that new account then it provides guidance on what may need to be changed to correct the issue.

Add a user or group on Mac - Apple Support

Once the testing is complete, the new account can easily be deleted.

Delete a user or group on Mac – Apple Support

If you have 3rd party ‘protection’ software installed, that may be the problem. That includes:

• Cleaners (software claiming to automatically free up space)
• Optimizers (software claiming to make your Mac run faster)
• Antivirus software
• VPN software (unless provided by a school/employer to enable access to internal resources from a remote location)

Such 3rd party system ‘helpers’, ‘cleaners’ and ‘protectors’ do more harm than good. In fact, such products are completely unnecessary for macOS and the only ‘good’ (if you want to call it that) they do is to put money in the developers’ pockets. Cleaners and protectors cause compatibility issues, often after macOS updates. Commercial VPNs claim to hide your browsing activity from websites, and while that may be true those VPN providers just sell your browsing data to others. For the user, all of these types of software offer only harm…and if that is limited to harm to your bank account, then count yourself lucky. If you have installed such software, follow the developer’s instructions to completely uninstall it (note that some developers fail to provide instructions and their software installs can be pervasive, meaning the only way to truly remove it is to erase your Mac, reinstall macOS then restore your user files from a backup).

It might help to download and run EtreCheck, written by a long-time forum member. The free version is fine. Post the full report using the Additional Text button. No personal information is revealed. 

I have two 16" MacBook Pros (M4 Pro running Golden Gate, M1 Pro running Tahoe). Both are as snappy and functional as when they came out of the box. The 'simple fix' is to ensure that your drive has sufficient space and not to install crapware on your Mac.

PQuincy wrote:

Console tells me the most recent complete crash was from 'textunderstandingd', if I read it correctly.

Your above “ Console tells me the most recent complete crash was from 'textunderstandingd', if I read it correctly. “

This report is useful, and it changes how I would interpret the textunderstandingd incident. 

It does not show a conventional application crash, and it does not establish that this process caused your Mac to freeze.

What the report actually tells us

Report field

Interpretation

Process: textunderstandingd

An Apple system service associated with text-understanding functionality was involved.

Path: /usr/libexec/textunderstandingd

The executable resides in macOS's system area, rather than being a third-party application.

OS Version: macOS 27.0.1 (26A434)

Identifies the precise OS version and build reported.

Exception Type: EXC_GUARD

A guard mechanism was triggered.

This can occur when a process performs a prohibited or guarded operation; the exception name alone does not establish a software defect.

Exception Subtype: GUARD_TYPE_USER

The guard event was classified as a user-type guard exception.

Triggered by Thread: 2

Thread 2 was associated with the reported event. The thread's backtrace would be needed to understand what it was doing.

Time Awake Since Boot: 730 seconds

The Mac had been running for about 12 minutes before this event.

Exception Note: SIMULATED (this is NOT a crash)

The most important line: the report explicitly says this was a simulated event, not a conventional crash.

What does SIMULATED (this is NOT a crash) mean?

The report describes a guard event that the reporting mechanism classifies as simulated rather than a conventional crash.

We should not interpret it as proof that textunderstandingd crashed unexpectedly, nor assume the process was responsible for the system-wide freezes.

The exception code and reason code (0x5) are not sufficient on their own to establish the exact triggering operation. I would need the complete report, particularly the Termination Reason, Application Specific Information, and Thread 2 backtrace, if those sections are present.

Could textunderstandingd explain your freezes?

Possibly, but this report alone does not make that connection.

Text-understanding services may be involved in system intelligence features and processing text. However, the report does not show that this service consumed excessive CPU, blocked the graphical interface, or interfered with Fast User Switching.

There are three possibilities worth distinguishing:

1. An incidental event: The service generated a diagnostic report without materially affecting system performance.
2. A service-specific problem: The service repeatedly encounters a fault or performs excessive work, contributing to slowdowns.
3. A wider system problem: The service event coincides with a separate bottleneck, such as excessive I/O, memory pressure, or another system component becoming unresponsive.

The current evidence cannot distinguish these possibilities.

What I would investigate next

Given that your symptoms affect two M4 Macs, persist after reinstallations, and include both input lag and long Fast User Switching delays, I would concentrate on evidence collected during an actual slowdown.

First, check whether textunderstandingd is repeatedly generating reports. One report is much less informative than a series of reports occurring at the same times as the freezes.

Second, inspect Activity Monitor while the Mac is affected. Record the Memory Pressure graph, Swap Used, and CPU usage of the relevant processes. The key is to capture what is happening during the incident rather than infer the cause from accumulated CPU time.

Third, compare timestamps. If the textunderstandingd event occurs at 03:38, for example, look for other system reports or high resource usage around that time. A correlation with repeated interface freezes would make the service more interesting to investigate, although correlation alone would not prove causation.

I would not disable this Apple service, delete system files, or reinstall macOS again on the strength of this report.

One important question

Can you paste the rest of the report, starting at Termination Reason if present, and including the Thread 2 Crashed or corresponding thread-backtrace section?

If those sections are absent, paste the remainder of the report anyway. The thread information may tell us what operation triggered the guard event and whether this report provides any meaningful lead into your broader macOS reliability problem.

If you want our assistance, then when you encounter the problem again, then run the EtreCheck app as suggested & post the complete report here so we can examine it for clues. This way the EtreCheckk app can capture performance metrics while the issue is occurring or shortly thereafter which may help us to provide some suggestions.

In my experience macOS Tahoe runs very smoothly until it hits a brick wall when exceeding memory & storage limits. Otherwise any issues are due to issues with third party software that has been installed. Many times those third party apps will have compatibility issues when upgrading to a new major version of macOS (sometimes even minor OS update patches). Or perhaps your computers have some sort of hardware issue (internal or from an externally connected device(s) ).

How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting an EtreCheck Report - Apple Community

There is not much we can do for you without seeing an EtreCheck report since something specific with your setup is causing the problem. If you don't wish to do this, then you will need to take your computer to Apple or an AASP so they can see the issue first hand to try to figure out the source of the problem.

Issues such as yours almost always relate to some 3rd party product running in the background that goes berserk after an OS update/upgrade. It can even be from some app installed long ago but was not really totally uninstalled and some fragment is left behind that continues to run.

FWIW, I have an M4 MacBook Air, 24GB RAM, 512GB SSD and it performs fine with things like VMWare Fusion running Windows 11 Virtual machines and Linux virtual machines, my high end photo processing apps for processing RAW photos, and embedded development environments including Visual Studio Code plus what is considered "normal" usage. Things I do not have on my machine are antivirus/malware apps (I don't visit dodgy websites or download apps from anywhere other than developer's sites), VPN, any "cleaning" apps or other system "tweaking" apps.

Your call, but an EtreCheck report may help.

You are basing your conclusion that 'Macs with Tahoe and Golden Gate are no longer reliably quick and stable for daily use' on your two Macs. There are over 100 million Macs in use with 50-60% running macOS Tahoe and another 10-15% on Golden Gate. The issues you describe are certainly not pervasive, but are specific to your systems. You can choose to troubleshoot them, or just blame Apple and hope for a fix. If you take the latter approach, you're going to have a long wait. Very long.

Post an EtreCheck report so that we can see what may be affecting your computer's performance:

Using EtreCheck - Apple Community

PQuincy wrote:

I understand the encouragement to undertake troubleshooting, and it's appropriate enough. But I also wanted to put out in the world the fact that several Macs I have, all reasonably well provided with memory and up to date, are having trouble with the basic functions of logging on, typing, moving the mouse, and saving files.

If millions of people aren't having problems but you are, is it more likely that the problems are with two different major versions of macOS or with your specific Macs? You seem to think it's the former. It's not.

There are 6 Macs in our house, 5 MacBook Pros (M1, M3, M3 Pro, M4, M4 Pro) and a MacBook Air (M3). Three are on Golden Gate, two on Tahoe and one on Sequoia (my son just won't give up Launchpad). All of them are running just fine, with zero freezing, beachballing, or other issues.

Trouble that is erratic, seems to have multiple etiologies all revolving around mysterious processes that I am not using intentionally, and that do not respond to some fairly major troubleshooting efforts. It has been tiring, though mostly just an annoyance - the machines work well enough, most of the time, now -- until the next mouse freeze, the next spinning beachball, the next unexplained crash.

The 'fairly major' troubleshooting efforts you have posted in this thread amount to posting one line from Console after a crash.

Do the issues occur in safe mode? You don't say. Do they occur in a new user account? You don't say.

Based on experience using Macs for about the same length of time as you (my first Mac was an SE/20 in 1987), and based on years of helping other users on these forums, the problems you describe almost always turn out to be due to the user installing one of those classes of software I mentioned previously ('helpers', 'cleaners', 'protectors', collectively termed crapware). Whether it's BrickMyMac, Avast, Norton or something else, such software is the most common cause of 'random, erratic, unexplained' issues, particularly after a major upgrade to macOS.

If such software has ever been installed, it is very difficult to remove completely. You may think it's gone, but there are typically extensions left behind that run in the background. For some software of that type, the only effective way to remove it is to wipe the Mac, reinstall macOS and applications and restore only user data.

If there were such extensions on your system, they would show up in an EtreCheck report...which multiple people have suggested that you post. But you haven't done that, either.

At this point, I will just wish you luck and move on.

Thanks for the quick reply. I wish it were a memory shortage, but it's not. All issues are also erratic... they are ok until suddenly the machine is lagging or crashing. I have no corporate software installed, nor any exotic stuff. As mentioned, I got rid of my prior set up where I used the same Dropbox from two Users... that was obviously not working anymore, so I fixed that. I now have two AppleIDs, for work and for home Users; one uses Dropbox for storage (work), the other iCloud. Plenty of hard drive space, plenty of memory (it seems).

MacAir M4: 131GB of 494GB storage used; 16.7 GB of 24G RAM used

Mac Mini M4: 307GB of 994GB storage used; 15 GB of 24G RAM used

"I don't suppose there is a simple fix. Apple has developed its ecosystem and added "features" (many of which I do not use) to a point where it's insanely complicated and inter-connected... at the cost of working right any more the way it used (Back in the **good old days**, ha!). "

Let’s get something straight right away. There is no way you can extrapolate your experience to include the entire user base. While it may comfort you to assume everybody is in the same boat wth you that is patently false logic. So instead of bashing Apple you should concentrate on dealing with your own individual situation. You have already been advised to do some troubleshooting. I suggest you do so instead of claiming Apple’s software is defective.

Thanks to all who have replied! I wish I weren't in this situation. I've been using Macs since I bought my first Mac 512 nearly 40 years ago, and the level of random frustration I've experienced in the last few months, over several different machines, has been a first. I understand the encouragement to undertake troubleshooting, and it's appropriate enough. But I also wanted to put out in the world the fact that several Macs I have, all reasonably well provided with memory and up to date, are having trouble with the basic functions of logging on, typing, moving the mouse, and saving files. Trouble that is erratic, seems to have multiple etiologies all revolving around mysterious processes that I am not using intentionally, and that do not respond to some fairly major troubleshooting efforts. It has been tiring, though mostly just an annoyance - the machines work well enough, most of the time, now -- until the next mouse freeze, the next spinning beachball, the next unexplained crash.

PQuincy wrote:

... I've been using Macs since I bought my first Mac 512 nearly 40 years ago, and the level of random frustration I've experienced in the last few months, ...

... etc etc etc

After all those decades the ratio of complaints to those actually willing to fix their Macs remains inexplicably high.

I'm losing my patience.

1 M2 Mac Mini 8 GB Unified RAM / 256 GB SSD, 1 M4 Mac Mini 16 GB UnifiedRAM / 500 GB SSD, 1 M6 Mac Mini also 16 GB RAM / 300 GB SSD and 1 M5 MBA 16 GB / 500 GB SSD

Each and every machine once had Golden Gate 27.0 and since updated to Golden Gate 27.0.1

Stable, responsive and without any lagging, hiccups etc

The only real issue that has been had is which machine to run at any given time

So what appears in your setup is rather localized and unique issue

Best of luck moving forwards

Console tells me the most recent complete crash was from 'textunderstandingd', if I read it correctly.

Macs with Tahoe and Golden Gate are no longer reliably quick and stable for daily use

My two Macs are faster and I don’t get random crashes from Fusion on 27.