Back in September, when macOS 26 Tahoe arrived to download on my MacBook, I installed it along with millions of other people. I hadn't thought about it – I have a MacBook Pro M3 Max with 36GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Starting the Tahoe shouldn't be a problem.
But that's how it was. Almost immediately from the first day of installation, I began experiencing intermittent freezes lasting a second or two that interrupted everything I was doing. I couldn't pin it down to one application and it was hard to predict. Some days this happened several times an hour, and other days it didn't happen at all.
I tried all the usual tricks – closing apps, restarting, shutting down – and, of course, immediately updated to macOS 26.0.1, but to no avail. Since I don't run betas on my main machine, I chalked it up to a bug in the initial release that will be fixed in version 26.1. Unfortunately, when I installed this update as soon as it appeared, the problem did not go away.
When I had a MacBook Pro M1, I had problems with memory slows down my carso I checked Activity Monitor throughout the day. Memory pressure was constantly in the green safe zone. There was one instance where my computer completely froze due to an application memory allocation issue, but again I couldn't find a specific reason. I have plenty of storage space, plenty of RAM, and haven't had any problems with a specific app. However, my machine continued to freeze randomly, some days dozens of times per hour.
Shed light on the problem
So after macOS 26.1 didn't fix the problem, I decided to investigate further. Everything was fine in Activity Monitor, but I noticed an error in the CPU tab. Although the CPU usage chart did not show any persistent problems, two processes—corespotlightd and kernel_task—were regularly using more than 100 percent of the CPU.
The corespotlightd process was using a ton of available CPU.
Foundry
I learned that each core counts as 100 percent, so technically my MacBook can use 1400 percent of the CPU. However, it seemed high for a background task, so I kept an eye on it. Indeed, corespotlightd was constantly using more than 100% CPU utilization, and sometimes almost 200%. I assumed this was bad, so I went into System Preferences to check the Spotlight tab.
I don't use Spotlight that often, but when I did, it loaded quickly and showed no obvious signs of slowing down my system. But the name of this particular task was clearly related to Spotlight, so I went to the Spotlight tab in the Settings app. Inside there are a number of toggles for each Apple app, system content, and clipboard. But what stood out to me the most were the two at the top: “Show related content” and “Help Apple improve search.” Specifically, the second one, which allows Apple to “store your Safari, Siri, Spotlight, Lookup and #images searches.”
So I turned them off. And almost instantly my CPU usage dropped. I watched as the corespotlightd process disappeared from my CPU waste list and the intermittent pauses stopped. I waited about an hour and it didn't come back, so out of curiosity I turned both switches back on. About a week passed and the problem did not return.
I'm not sure if my problem was specific to my machine, but if you're experiencing this problem, try toggling these two switches in Spotlight settings. This might just return your MacBook to normal.
