Since installing macOS Tahoe on my M3 Max MacBook, it hasn’t worked as expected. The issue isn’t with Liquid Glass or window corner radii, but rather with the MacBook freezing and the trackpad becoming unresponsive.
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.
This problem has been ongoing for the better part of a year, with the MacBook freezing dozens of times an hour on the worst days.
According to the Activity Monitor, the problem is related to a consistent CPU spike in the “core spotlight” task, followed by an immediate spike in the accompanying kernel.
A restart temporarily helps, but the problem crops up again before too long. The issue 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.
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 performance boost techniques through iCloud as a storage drive.
I turned off the Pages toggle in the Spotlight settings. Then I tried adding the Pages app and its Document folder to the Search Privacy option in Spotlight settings. 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.
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Neither of these attempts worked, and I was stuck dealing with the freezes and hoping they didn’t get any worse.
Unfortunately, they did, and it got to the point where whenever I clicked on a new window, my MacBook would stall for a second or two before it let me do anything.
I decided to root around the Library folder, where every app and feature has associated files that can be accessed if I find the right folder. A quick search told me where they were hiding: ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight.
To find it, click on the desktop, then the Go menu at the top, then scroll down to Go to Folder, paste that whole string, and press Return.
I found nearly 10,000 files and over 2GB of data.
Moving the whole folder into the Trash and selecting Delete Immediately solved the problem.
Two weeks later, there hasn’t been a single freeze, pause, or stutter on the MacBook.
