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How to stop the spinning wheel on your mac.

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What is the spinning wheel of death on a mac, how to fix the spinning wheel of death, got a persistent pinwheel restart your mac, a frequent spinning wheel indicates other problems, running yosemite or earlier repair permissions, beachball be gone.

Your Mac hijacking your cursor and asking you to wait around is never welcome. People call it different things, including the spinning wheel, beachball, or pinwheel of death.

The good news is a spinning wheel means macOS hasn't crashed completely. You might be able to wrestle back control.

That rainbow spinning wheel (whatever you might call it) is a common macOS wait cursor. It's triggered when an application doesn't respond for a few seconds and signals that you should wait before giving the app more instructions.

This isn't to be confused with the blue spinning wheel, which is also sometimes called the "JavaScript pinwheel." A blue wheel mostly appears in web content when running Java apps. It usually occurs when a website sends a wait command. It often appears in web apps, like Google Sheets.

A spinning wheel (or beachball) is a sign from the operating system that an app isn't behaving as it should. This is one of the better problems to encounter because it means your system is probably running fine. It's likely just one app that's causing the issue. If you find the app and fix the problem, you should be golden.

With that in mind, let's run through how to find the app in question, and how you can get rid of the spinning wheel.

Find the App Causing the Issue

A spinning wheel generally means macOS has detected a problem in a specific app. The good news is it also means your entire system (including the OS) hasn't crashed. In fact, a spinning wheel doesn't necessarily mean anything has crashed (yet).

If it's not already obvious, you can find the app causing the issue by cycling through those that are active. To do so, press Command+Tab or just click around on the screen (your mouse should still work even though the cursor has changed).

If you can't tell which app is causing the issue, Activity Monitor might be able to help. You can launch it by heading to Applications > Utilities or searching for it in Spotlight . Under the CPU tab click the "% CPU" column to organize the list by current system usage.

This puts the thirstiest apps at the top of the list. See if any are using more than their fair share of CPU resources. You might also see "(Not responding)" appended after the app name in the list. Resist quitting the app just yet and move on to the next step.

Wait a While

Many times, the spinning wheel of death appears when an app is trying to do something. For example, it might appear when you're trying to render a video in an editing program or perform batch edits in a photo-editing app. It might even pop up when you're connecting to a server in an online game.

In these cases, waiting is the best option. If you've already told an app to do something, you might as well give it some time to finish the task. Sometimes, this isn't something you explicitly requested. For example, the macOS Photos app might be performing image analysis on a set of photos you recently imported.

Other apps should function normally during this period, assuming you aren't putting the system under a huge load (like rendering video or 3D models, for example). Step away from your computer for a few minutes and let your Mac work out the problem.

Force Quit the Problem App

If you've waited a while for any tasks to complete, but your computer is still unresponsive, it might be a good idea to force quit and restart the app. If you have any unsaved data or work, you might lose it when you do this, so be sure you've given the app long enough to recover.

You can try quitting the app normally first. To do so, right-click (or two-finger click or press Control+Click) its icon in the Dock, and then choose Quit. The app might take a second to respond. However, by shutting it down normally, you might avoid losing any unsaved work.

Unfortunately, this doesn't always work. You can also force quit an app by right-clicking its icon in the Dock, holding the Option key on your keyboard, and then selecting "Force Quit."

Alternatively, you can launch Activity Monitor , find the app, and then quit the process from there.

When the problem app is closed, the spinning wheel of death should disappear. You should now be able to reopen the app and try again.

If the pinwheel refuses to disappear or keeps reappearing, restarting your machine is a good idea. Just click the Apple logo, select "Restart," and then wait. After your machine reboots, it should be fast and responsive, with no wait cursors in sight.

Sometimes, your Mac might crash to the point that restarting it via the Apple logo isn't possible. If this occurs (and you feel like you've waited long enough for it to respond), press and hold your Mac's power button (or the Touch ID button on some MacBooks) until it powers off.

This is the last resort for any major system crashes, and you will lose any unsaved work in the applications that are still running. If possible, save and close any apps that are still responding before you attempt this step.

It's reasonable to expect to see the spinning wheel from time to time, particularly when dealing with resource-intensive applications. However, if you start seeing it often and across a variety of applications, this might indicate a larger problem.

In this case, the state of your system could be contributing to software instability. One common cause is a lack of available storage. Your Mac needs free space to function. Both the operating system and third-party applications swell and contract their use of storage over time

So, first, make sure your Mac has enough free space . Apple doesn't specify what the "right" amount of free space is. However, we recommend leaving about 10% of your primary disk space (around 20GB on a 256GB MacBook). That should be enough to keep the cogs turning.

A lack of RAM might also cause the spinning pinwheel to regularly appear in memory-hungry apps. There's not a lot you can do about this unless you're using an iMac, Mac mini, or Mac Pro that allows you to upgrade the memory .

Related: How to Free Up Disk Space on a Mac

If you're stuck on an older version of macOS, like 10.10 (OS X Yosemite) or earlier, you might want to try repairing disk permissions if you're seeing the spinning wheel a lot.

To f ind out which version of macOS you're running , click the Apple logo at the top left and select About This Mac. If it's version 10.11 or later, you can skip this section.

If you're working with version 10.10 or earlier, launch Disk Utility by navigating to Applications > Utilities folder or just search for it in Spotlight. Select the main boot drive (usually called "Macintosh HD") in the sidebar, and then click "First Aid." Let your Mac scan and repair any errors it finds.

This isn't necessary on 10.11 (El Capitan) or later, as Apple introduced changes to the way the permission system works.

Hopefully, these tips will give you a good idea of how to solve any future problems with the spinning wheel (or beachball) of death.

Keep in mind, though, the one good thing about seeing the spinning wheel is the problem is likely one app. If you're having system-wide instability, though, you might want to learn how to fix a frozen Mac next.

Related: How to Fix a Frozen Mac

5 Ways To Stop The Spinning Beach Ball

May 16, 2021 | Apple Mac Software , Killer Secrets | 0 comments

• What Is The Spinning Beach Ball

To most of us it’s known as the ‘spinning beach ball’, ‘rainbow pinwheel’, or ‘ferris wheel of death’. Apple simply call it the ‘ spinning wait cursor ‘, a name that’s accurate, but lacks the impending sense of doom that little ball creates.

It occurs when your Mac attempts to complete a task, but has to wait for the hardware resources needed to finish it.

It can be caused by other things, but the end result is the same. Your Mac becomes unresponsive . . . and you start screaming.

So . . . is there anything we can do about this?

• FirstHeading

1. Be Patient.

2. force quit the app that has frozen, 3. eject external drives, 4. fix storage problems, 5. force shutdown, get help now.

When you hit the spinning beach ball, give your Mac a few minutes to finish what it is doing. With a little time, your computer may fully recover and you can continue working.

The spinning beach ball is not always a terminal event.

If only one App is having a problem, go to the Apple Menu in the top left-hand corner and choose Force Quit… Select the App that’s causing problems and click ‘Force Quit’.

The good news is that you can now safely save any work you have open.

If you reopen the App and it continues to freeze, you will have to do a restart. 

When they’re not in use, external drives tend to go to sleep.

Actions like opening and saving files can cause the Mac to wait for those external drives to wake up. They may never wake up or take so long you’ll be tearing your hair out.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to access those drives, the Mac doesn’t know that and it’s just trying to be thorough.

Go into the Finder and eject these drives. The beach ball will immediately disappear.

The Mac uses free hard drive space to store information as it processes tasks. If the free space on your computer falls below roughly 15- 25 GB, you’ll encounter the spinning beach ball.

Before reaching this point you wou will get warnings on your Mac that ‘ Your startup disk is almost full ‘. 

Do not ignore these warnings. You can find instructions on how to manage storage in the link to the blog post above.

If none of the options above work, you will have to Force Shutdown your Mac.

• Hold the power button down for 6-8 seconds until the screen goes black.
• Let go of the power button, then click it once to turn the Mac back on.

You may lose work that you have not saved. To minimise this possibility, use the Autosave function in any Apps that offer it and try to get into the habit of saving regularly.

Microsoft Office provides excellent Autosave capabilities…  and remember to always use Time Machine.

I hope these tips are useful.

If your Mac is slow and you repeatedly get the spinning beach ball, there may be other factors causing the problem.

We provide thorough diagnostics and make recommendations on how to resolve the problem.

An analysis of this kind can be completed in under an hour. If you need help please call (310) 621-5679 or complete the Contact Form below.

Have a great week.

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How To: Get rid of Safari’s Spinning Beach Ball

Posted by Dr. Macenstein on Tuesday, December 15, 2015 · 1 Comment  

There’s dozens of reasons as to why you might be getting a spinning beach ball when visiting certain web pages in Safari, and there are also dozens of solutions you COULD try. I know this because I tried them all while trying to figure out why web pages in general, but Yahoo’s Pro Football Pick ’em and Amazon.com in particular, were giving me more beachballs than a British Rock Festival.

Here’s what I did to solve MY problem: With Safari open, go to the top of your screen and click the word SAFARI Choose PREFERENCES Go to SECURITY UNCHECK the bottom option for INTERNET PLUG-INS ALLOW PLUG-INS Quit Safari completely , and then relaunch .

Immediately after doing this I was able to once again make my losing Football Pool picks, and it has fixed my beach ball problem for over 2 weeks now. I am not sure what plug-ins I have disabled by unchecking that (I have not noticed anything not working as I watch YouTube and surf the web) but it’s possible that if you rely on some special plug-in to get things done, this may not be an option for you.

If that did NOT solve your problem, try following the usual suggestions of Trashing your Safari Prefs Deleting your Safari Cache Completely wiping your computer clean and starting from scratch as those are the suggestions you will find time and again from the Google Machine.

Share this:

Filed under Feature , Latest News , Tips/How To · Tagged with

How about Apple actually make it work properly instead of us fixing it My problem is that Safari is slow under any circumstances, with or without deleting cache and preferences and history and .prefs files I even have a blank start page to stop safari looking and sniffing under the carpet before actually working. But even with absolutely no cache, history, cookies or homepage, Safari hovers on startup for about 54 seconds before i can type and search. None of the above speed up safari much, because the problem is not a cache/history/cookies one.. its Apple Safari spying on 500 things before it allows you to begin. its just Safari itself trying to look for a lot of user data, and icloud tabs data. Apple are trying to process too much big data about each user in the cloud, and since iCloud Drive arrived, OSX has become much slower than Windows Computers to start up. All my macbooks and macs take at least 2 minutes before the menubar and desktop are fully loaded, and a Windows laptop takes about 10 seconds to load desktop. Apple used to hav an advert which shows just how fast a mac starts up compared to a Windows pc. Now its the other way round.

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Constant Safari Beach Balling

• Thread starter dejayou
• Start date Apr 6, 2021
• Sort by reaction score
• Older macOS Versions
• macOS Big Sur (11)

macrumors newbie

• Apr 6, 2021

For the past 3-4 days or so Safari has been borderline unusable for me on my early 2015 MacBook 12" running masOS Big Sur 11.2.3. Anytime I try to scroll on a site, switch tabs, and even while I'm typing this post, I am getting constant beach balls/freezes. When trying to Command - Q Safari it takes 15-30 seconds to close the app. Here is what I've tried so far: 1.) Switching saved history from 1 year to 30 days. 2.) Disabling all extensions. 3.) Clearing the cache via the Develop menu. None of this has improved the performance of Safari, and I'm not sure what else to try. Like I said, this has just started happening in the past few days. I tried other browsers (Edge/Firefox) and both are working fine. Does anyone have any suggestions?  

macrumors 6502a

• May 16, 2021

I don't suppose you ever found a solution to this? I've got an M1 that has been acting weird with Safari and only Safari recently. Beachball every time I try to open a new tab. Everything else about it is as quick as the day I bought it, so I assume it's a Safari issue.  

Taco1933 said: I don't suppose you ever found a solution to this? I've got an M1 that has been acting weird with Safari and only Safari recently. Beachball every time I try to open a new tab. Everything else about it is as quick as the day I bought it, so I assume it's a Safari issue. Click to expand...

dejayou said: I was able to resolve it by uninstalling my extensions, restarting my computer, and then reinstalling them. Give this a try and see if it helps. Click to expand...

• Apple Computing Products:
• macOS - Apps and Programs

How do I stop the spinning beach ball in Safari extensions?

• Thread starter gogreen1
• Start date Apr 25, 2021
• Apr 25, 2021

I'm using Safari 14.0.3 on an iMac and a MacBook Air. On my iMac, when I go into Preferences > Extensions, I get the spinning beach ball for about 10 seconds before I can check or uncheck extensions. On the MBA I get no spinning beach ball and I can check or uncheck extensions immediately. What's causing the spinning beach ball on my iMac and how do I stop it?  

gogreen1 said: I'm using Safari 14.0.3 on an iMac and a MacBook Air. On my iMac, when I go into Preferences > Extensions, I get the spinning beach ball for about 10 seconds before I can check or uncheck extensions. On the MBA I get no spinning beach ball and I can check or uncheck extensions immediately. Click to expand...

Thanks, pm-r. Yes--I have the same extensions running on both computers. I use 1Password, and I have Adguard and Wipr intalled on both computers (but not running at the same time--I'm still evaluating both). It doesn't seem to matter whether they're installed or not because I still get the spinning beach ball, even with none, so I suspect it's coming from a setting elsewhere.  

gogreen1 said: It doesn't seem to matter whether they're installed or not because I still get the spinning beach ball, even with none, so I suspect it's coming from a setting elsewhere. Click to expand...

pm-r said: Maybe having a look at the specific Console logs or even Activity Monitor may give you an idea of what might be going on??? Click to expand...

What iMac and what MBA? Are they the same age? Same type drive? Same memory? Are we actually comparing apples to apples here?  

• Apr 26, 2021

I have the same questions as Jake above. A 2012 iMac will perform very differently running the same macOS and software versions to say: a 2020 Macbook Air.  

• Apr 27, 2021

Sorry for the late reply. Both the iMac and the MBA are 2017. The iMac has 32GB of memory, the MBA, 8GB. Both are i7 processors. You'd think, though, that the MBA would be the one with the spinning beach ball. Both machines performed similarly before the upgrade to Big Sur. As I recall, that's when the Safari problem on the iMac started.  

• May 1, 2021

Are their other users logged in, or apps open, which will still be using resources? How about browser tabs?  

gogreen1 said: Both machines performed similarly before the upgrade to Big Sur. As I recall, that's when the Safari problem on the iMac started. Click to expand...

• May 3, 2021

gogreen1 said: The same thing happens in Safe Mode. On both computers, no other users logged on, and only one browser tab open. Click to expand...

Well-known member

• May 4, 2021

I decided it's time to reinstall Big Sur. The three options are 1) installing the latest version of macOS compatible with my computer, 2) reinstalling my computer's original version of macOS with available updates, or 3) reinstalling the version of macOS stored on my computer's built-in recovery disk. I hate to ask a dumb question, but which one of these options should I choose? And about how long does this reinstall take? Thanks, all for sticking with me on this!  

Try option 3 first. What you want is to reinstall BS over the version you have now. That should re-establish all of the critical parts for the system but leave your data intact. If that doesn't fix it, then a full reformat/reinstall/restore from backup is in order. No real reason to go backwards, just reinstall Big Sur.  

Thanks, Jake. Tomorrow's project.  

• May 6, 2021

Well, option 3 didn't fix the problem. Do any of the other options in post #14 leave my desktop and customizations intact, as did option 3?  

In a word, no. At this point make a backup and do a full, disk-erasing, nuke and pave installation. Or live with a spinning beachball.  

gogreen1 said: For now, I'll live with the spinning beachball. Click to expand...

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Beach balls in Safari

Safari has become very unresponsive on my 6 week old Mac Mini M1 computer. Getting many beach balls.

Using Safari 14.0.3 and Big Sur, 11.2.3.

All tips will be appreciated.

BTW switched to Firefox with no beach ball issues.

Mac mini 2018 or later

Posted on Apr 26, 2021 12:40 AM

Posted on Apr 26, 2021 2:53 AM

If Safari on your Mac isn't working as you expect, one of these solutions might help.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204098

Similar questions

• Beach ball in Safari I find that when I am using Safari, especially on Twitter or Facebook, I get frequent and annoying beach balls which take about 30 seconds to stop. Things go back to normal, but it happens again and again. It seems like something is trying to load. Using Firefox, it never happens, so it's specific to Safari. Is there some way to identify a process or something to check to see what is causing this in Safari? 493 11
• beach balling on my mac i have a mac desktop Catalina 10.15.7 operating system.and i am getting the beach balling every time i go to another app. 314 3
• Spinning beach ball on MacDailyNews website Within 30 seconds of accessing the MacDailyNews website I get the spinning beach ball. Once I get it cursor no longer works and the only way to get it back again is to close that tabbed window. It doesn't lock up Safari, just the tab it is occupying. I am currently running Mac OS 10.13.6 with Safari Version 13.0.2 (13608.2.40.1.3). This has been happening for a while now with previous versions of Safari as well. Is anyone else having this problem or know how to fix it? 391 1

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Apr 26, 2021 2:53 AM in response to Western AZ Mac

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Due to the COVID-19 public health situation, all programming is currently suspended. North Shore Aquatic Complex and Walter Fuller Pool are open effective Monday, May 4, by order of Pinellas County. There are restrictions on admission to these pools. Read the 5-1-20 Update Link is a PDF for more details. For COVID-19 updates from the City of St. Petersburg, visit stpete.org/emergency .

SAVE THE DATE: Join us for our annual Car Wash Fundraiser, cosponsored by the St. Petersburg Fire Rescue, on Saturday, Feb. 11, from 9 AM - 12 PM at Northwest Pool .

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729 89th Avenue N,  Saint Petersburg, FL 33702

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Jimary Jimenez

Frank Rogers

Sun Cay Real Estate

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September 21, 2024, 10:17 PM

About This Home

One-of-a-kind and central to all that makes Tampa Bay such a special place to live, this stunning newer construction home sits above a MASSIVE 4 car garage with bonus space and a HUGE luxurious covered patio. Beneath this over 3000sf home you will find over 1700sf of fresh commercial grade epoxy in the garage and porcelain tile covering 1500sf of outside covered patio. The 4+ car garage can house and keep your vehicles, toys, and a variety of items protected - you can have a literal ball in there. The outside tiled patio is a whole living space on its own. It all sits on a large and newly fenced-in lot with multiple gates - including a double gate on the alley where you can pull in your boat, RV and whatever else you might need. If luxury awaits you in the garage and outside, imagine what you find when you enter the actual home. Through grand double doors you are greeted by an elegant foyer and staircase. Up the stairs it is open, it is large, and it is gorgeous. Exceptionally large bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets are luxuries you can enjoy when you have square footage to work with. Double islands positioned strategically for cooking, eating and entertaining are yet another feature that will set your home far apart from other homes. French doors off of the living room and Primary Suite both lead to the large balcony for relaxing or adding to the entertaining space. This home is an entertaining dream. The impeccably cared for home sits on a large lot adorned with lush tropical palm trees, a mango tree, and beautiful landscaping. As for the neighborhood? The neighborhood could not be in a better location. From here you are 10-15 minutes to both St. Pete/Clearwater and Tampa Inter'l airports. 15-20 minutes to both St. Pete and Tampa Downtowns. Approximately 30 minutes to St. Pete Beach, Clearwater beach and beaches in between. Tampa and St Pete Hospitals and Medical Centers are all just a short trip. Tampa Bay is a magical place to live, St. Petersburg is the perfect place to call home - this is truly a must see!

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