If your Mac has been throwing up beach balls and your trackpad goes dead for several seconds at a time since updating to macOS 26.5, you are not alone, and there is now a fix. 9to5Mac reported today on a reliable solution to what has become a widespread problem for users on the latest macOS Tahoe release.
What’s actually happening
Open Activity Monitor during one of these freeze events and you will almost certainly find the same three processes chewing through your CPU: media analysis, kernel_task, and corespotlightd. The worst offender is mediaanalysisd, which handles Apple’s background AI photo scanning, including object recognition and face detection across your photo library. On affected systems it gets stuck in a loop and never finishes, consuming anywhere from 50% to 150% CPU in the process. The system bogs down, the trackpad stops responding, and you get the beach ball.
This is directly tied to Apple Intelligence. The AI photo analysis features introduced with Apple Intelligence are what put mediaanalysisd to work in the first place. On a functioning system, this indexing runs quietly in the background while the machine is idle or plugged in. On affected machines, it simply never stops.
The bug appears more common on Apple Silicon, specifically M3 and M4 Macs, where these daemons get stuck in a constant loop rather than completing their indexing pass and standing down.
The fix
The primary solution is straightforward: plug your Mac into power and leave it overnight. The goal is to give mediaanalysisd enough uninterrupted time to finish its photo library analysis completely. Once it finishes, it stops consuming resources and the freezes go away.
If that does not resolve things or the problem returns, there are several additional approaches users have documented:
- Use Terminal with
launchctlto disable the offending processes (mediaanalysisd, corespotlightd) - Delete all files and folders in
~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/and reboot, which some users report needing to repeat every three to four weeks - Delete and regenerate configuration files, though this requires disabling System Integrity Protection and is not a step to take lightly
The launchctl and CoreSpotlight folder deletion approaches are workarounds, not fixes. The SIP-disabled option is the kind of thing most users should not attempt without knowing exactly what they are doing.
What Apple should do here
The core issue is that mediaanalysisd has no upper bound on the resources it will consume, and on some machines it enters a state it cannot exit on its own. Apple needs to ship a patch that either caps the daemon’s CPU budget or detects and recovers from the stuck-loop condition automatically. Leaving your Mac plugged in overnight is a workaround, not a solution, especially when some users report the issue returning weeks later.
A proper fix should land in macOS 26.6, which is the logical next step for a major bug. In the meantime, the overnight charging approach is your best first move, and deleting the CoreSpotlight metadata folder is a reasonable fallback if things stay bad.
