Spinning wheel on Mac: what the beach ball means and how to fix it

The spinning wheel on a Mac, the rainbow beach ball, means the app under your pointer has stopped responding to clicks and keys for a few seconds, usually because it is busy or waiting for something. If it is doing heavy work, wait a minute or two. If it doesn't clear, force quit that one app.

Apple calls it the spinning wait cursor. Seeing it now and then is normal. Seeing it every day usually means the Mac is short of disk space or memory, or one app needs an update, and those are all fixable.

What does the spinning wheel mean?

Every app on a Mac has to keep answering the system: here is a click, here is a key press, redraw this window. When an app stops answering for a few seconds, macOS swaps your pointer for the spinning wheel whenever it is over that app's windows. The app hasn't necessarily crashed. It may be in the middle of something long and simply unable to listen to you until it finishes.

The important detail is that the wheel belongs to one app. Move the pointer onto the Dock, the desktop or another app's window:

• If the pointer turns back into an arrow, only that one app is stuck. Everything else works, and you can carry on in another app while you decide what to do.
• If the wheel follows you everywhere, including the Dock and the menu bar, the whole Mac is struggling. That usually points at memory, the startup disk or Finder, and the later sections are for you.

How long should you wait before force quitting?

There is no fixed number, but what the app was doing when the wheel appeared is a good guide.

That last point decides a lot. If the stuck app holds an hour of unsaved writing, a five-minute wait is cheap. If it is a web page you can reload, there is no reason to sit there. When you are ready, how to force quit on a Mac covers every way to do it.

Find which app is stuck

Usually the stuck app is obvious, because it is the one you were using. When it isn't, two places will tell you.

• The Force Quit window. Press Option-Command-Esc. Apps that have stopped responding are usually marked in the list.
• Activity Monitor. Open it from Applications > Utilities, or press Command-Space and type its name. A stuck app shows "(Not Responding)" after its name. Click the % CPU column to sort by processor use. A stuck app sitting near zero for minutes is unlikely to recover. One working hard may still be getting somewhere, though if it stays pinned near the top for many minutes with nothing to show for it, it may be stuck in a loop.

Finder deserves a special mention. It often shows the wheel when it is waiting on a drive: a network share that has dropped, a sleeping external disk that takes a moment to spin up, or a disk that is failing. If Finder freezes whenever you open one particular drive, that drive is the likely cause. Eject it if you can, or relaunch Finder from the Force Quit window.

Why does my Mac keep showing the spinning wheel?

When the wheel turns up every day, across different apps, look for one of these.

The startup disk is nearly full

macOS uses spare room on the startup disk all the time, for caches, temporary files and swap, which is where memory overflows when it runs out. A disk with almost no space left makes all of that slower, and the Mac feels it everywhere. Check in System Settings > General > Storage. Startup disk almost full has a safe way to clear space.

Memory is running short

Open Activity Monitor and click the Memory tab. At the bottom is a Memory Pressure graph. Green means memory is fine. Yellow means macOS is working harder to juggle it. Red means it is short of memory and leaning heavily on the disk, which is when the wheel shows up everywhere. Quit apps you aren't using and close browser tabs you opened last week. If the graph sits in the red on an ordinary day, your work has outgrown the Mac's memory.

Something is busy in the background

After a macOS update, a migration or a large import, the Mac often catches up on background work such as rebuilding its Spotlight index or syncing with iCloud. That can make it sluggish for a while, and it usually settles on its own. Leave it plugged in and awake for a bit.

An app or extension needs an update

A single app that beach-balls constantly, while everything else is fine, usually has a bug. Update it. Older add-ons that load into other apps or into the system, such as plug-ins and extensions, can slow down everything they touch.

The Mac hasn't restarted in weeks

Apps that leak a little memory, and background processes that got into a strange state, pile up over a long uptime. A restart clears all of it.

When it happens all the time

Work through these in order, checking after each one.

1. Restart the Mac. Apple menu > Restart. It fixes more than it should.
2. Update macOS and your apps. System Settings > General > Software Update for macOS, and each app's own update option for the rest.
3. Make room on the startup disk, as above.
4. Trim what opens at login. In recent versions of macOS, look in System Settings > General > Login Items (labeled Login Items & Extensions in some versions) and turn off anything you don't need at startup.
5. Try safe mode. It starts the Mac with only the essentials. On a Mac with Apple silicon, shut down, then press and hold the power button until the startup options appear, select your startup disk, hold Shift and click Continue in Safe Mode. On an Intel Mac, restart and hold Shift until the login window appears. If the wheel disappears in safe mode, something that normally loads at startup is the likely culprit. Restart normally to leave safe mode.
6. Run First Aid. Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities, select your startup volume and click First Aid.

If none of that helps, the problem may be hardware, especially on an older Mac. Apple Support or an Apple Store can run diagnostics and tell you whether a part is failing.

Where Notchpals fits

Notchpals doesn't watch for the wheel, and it can't unstick an app. Its Tech care characters do keep an eye on two of the causes above, and mention them before they start costing you time. When less than 10 percent of your startup disk is free, the Tech care character in your crew suggests a clear-out, at most once a week. Gumdrop, a gumball robot, sees the problem in its own terms.

GumdropEven I can't fit one more gumball. Your disk can't either. Tidy up!

The other nudge comes when the Mac has gone a week without a restart, again no more than weekly and only during working hours. Neither is urgent: if you are halfway through an export, press Later and come back to it. Once the disk has room and the Mac has restarted recently, a wheel that still turns up usually points at one app rather than the whole machine, which makes it much easier to track down. How often to restart your Mac explains why a weekly restart is plenty.