Any time I bring up the Open or Save panel, or select items to open or save, I experience a 3–5 second delay, complete with spinning rainbow cursor. macOS Tahoe 26.1, MacBook Pro, 14-inch, M2 Max (12C/30G/32GB/1TB.) Is anyone else experiencing this?
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.1
The spinning rainbow indicates waiting for IO. Do you have any slow drive or SD card attached to your mac?
You may be intending to save to the super fast internal, but when you initiate a save or open, any drive is to be made available. A slow hard drive spinning up could easily cause these symptoms.
The spinning rainbow indicates waiting for IO. Do you have any slow drive or SD card attached to your mac?
You may be intending to save to the super fast internal, but when you initiate a save or open, any drive is to be made available. A slow hard drive spinning up could easily cause these symptoms.
Thank you for the new report. I take it that even without the external drives connected there is still a slowdown.
This is the only thing that I can see that looks like it could play a part in it:
App Extensions:
Finder sync extensions:
[Loaded] Adobe Content Synchronizer Finder Extension - /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Sync/CoreSync/Core Sync.app
[Loaded] Adobe Context Menu Extension - /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe OS Extension/Creative Cloud.app
Note that I don't have Adobe software, and I am not familiar with their particular Finder sync extensions.
Finder sync extensions are meant to allow the user to treat cloud storage in a way that is identical to local storage.
They are used by the likes of dropbox, onedrive, googledrive.
It is possible that the inherent latency in accessing cloud content may be what is impacting your open and save actions.
Does the same problem occur in Safe Mode?
I would try and look for other causes before doing a full erase and reinstall.
Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.
Owl-53 wrote:
@ Luis S
There were " System extension blocked - There are system extensions awaiting user approval. " in the first Etrecheck report that are no longer appear in the 2nd
Any association with the current issue ?
I do no know
If they were blocked, they were not doing anything at the time.
I ran a diff on the two reports, and apparently the extension waiting for authorization was by ProtonVPN.
It was not authorized before, which means it was not doing anything at the time.
And the second report has not mention of ProtonVPN at all, which, as I'm sure you agree, it is a GOOD thing.
And since apparently the issue persists, I think that that was not the cause, anyway (though I'm still glad that it is gone).
Thanks for your response, Luis. This is attempting to open or save JPEGs to and from the internal SSD. No external drives involved. In fact, Adobe Lightroom Classic CC launches and populates previews and full-resolution RAW files from an external SSD faster than the default macOS Open/Save panel functions with JPEGs on the internal SSD only. This didn't occur on macOS 15 or earlier, at all.
Luis -- when I ran EtreCheck, I had one USB thumb drive attached. As per the report:
USB:
USB 3.1 Bus
<Empty>
USB 3.1 Bus
<Empty>
USB 3.1 Bus
SanDisk 3.2Gen1
However, this issue persists without it attached, and without any of my other external disks attached (I do use several regularly, but this issue exists independently.)
I'll run it again now, with only MagSafe connected. New report + screenshot of Disk Utility attached:
@ Luis S
There were " System extension blocked - There are system extensions awaiting user approval. " in the first Etrecheck report that are no longer appear in the 2nd
Any association with the current issue ?
I do no know
Luis,
Thank you for delving into this. Of course it's Adobe's fault -- pervasive little sneaks. I tend to use the web UI of Drive, Dropbox, etc., but Adobe CC is a necessary local install for the associated apps that I use.
I've disabled Adobe's Core Sync services and restarted, and the issue persists. Sigh. I'm hoping something or other fixes this in 26.2, because 26/26.1 are the only versions of macOS wherein I've ever encountered this.
Thank you, sincerely, for your brainstorming contributions so far. If you conjure up any more, I'm all ears!
It does still occur in safe mode, yes, as well as after a reinstall of 26.1 (just a reinstall, without a full disk erase.) Do you think a full disk erase is next?
Luis -- see here.
👍
Update: this issue has self-resolved, spontaneously. I changed nothing. I'll ignore my confusion and accept this result.
You are trying to save to your local SSD, but your system has several other drives connected. When initiating an open or save operation, all these drives need to be ready, including the two mechanical hard drives.
To determine if that is what is causing the slowdown, you could just test the same kind of operation when these drives are completely disconnected from your mac. Same slowdown? If the slowdown disappears, then we will have determined that these drives spinning up is the problem.
If it persists even without them, we will have to dig deeper into the report.
Open/Save slowdown | macOS 26.1 Tahoe
