Spinning wait cursor

Wait a little first, especially if the app is opening a large file or saving. Switch to another app to check whether the rest of the Mac responds.

If the app stays stuck, open Activity Monitor and look for it in red with (Not Responding). You can sample the process to capture what it is doing, then quit it. Force Quit is the last step, since unsaved changes can be lost.

Repeated beach balls in one app point to that app, and updating it is a good first step. Beach balls across many apps can mean the Mac is short on memory, a disk is almost full, or a background process is keeping the CPU busy. Check memory pressure and % CPU in Activity Monitor.

The spinning cursor appears only over the windows of the app that is not responding. Move the pointer over another app's window or the Desktop. If it turns back into an arrow, the rest of the Mac is fine.

1. Open Activity Monitor from Applications > Utilities, or press Command-Space and type Activity Monitor.
2. Look for a process in red with (Not Responding) after its name.
3. If nothing is red, click the CPU tab and sort by % CPU to see which process is busy.
4. Click the Memory tab and check the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom.

The cursor means the app's main thread is busy or waiting. That can start inside the app or elsewhere on the Mac.

• The app is doing a long task on its main thread, such as opening a large file or building a big export.
• The app is waiting on a slow disk, a network drive, or a network request that has not answered.
• The Mac is low on memory and swapping, so everything takes longer.
• The startup disk is almost full.
• A background process, such as Spotlight indexing or a backup, keeps the CPU or disk busy.
• A bug in the app, such as two threads waiting on each other.

These commands are read only. They show the same kinds of figures as Activity Monitor.

• top -o cpu lists processes by CPU use. Press q to exit.
• vm_stat prints memory page counts, including pageouts and swapouts. Numbers that keep climbing while you work point to memory pressure.
• sysctl vm.swapusage shows how much swap is in use.
• df -h / shows how full the startup disk is.

If it is always the same app, update it and check whether the problem follows one file or one task. Capture a sample in Activity Monitor while it spins, and send it to the developer.

If it happens in many apps, the cause is usually shared: memory pressure, a full disk, or one process keeping the CPU busy. Vitals can notify you when an app keeps the CPU busy or keeps growing in memory, which helps catch the pattern before the beach balls start.