There have been growing complaints about users experiencing beach balls on the Mac when running macOS 26.5, with some also saying that their trackpad becomes completely unresponsive for several seconds at a time.
Activity Monitor typically reveals three culprits, and there does now appear to be a reliable solution to the problem …
I last month highlighted the issue, speculating that Apple Intelligence photo scanning might be the cause. Checking Activity Monitor typically reveals high CPU usage with one, two, or three processes.
One process was variously using anything from 50% up to 150%: mediaanalysisd. Googling this found a number of users complaining about the same issue, with others seeing high CPU usage also for kernel_task and corespotlightd.
Macworld’s Michael Simon also fell victim to this.
