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.

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.

At any moment, my Mac will freeze, with my trackpad becoming unresponsive and a spinning beach ball replacing my cursor. It only lasts a few seconds, but on the worst days, it happens dozens of times an hour and renders the trackpad completely unresponsive, as if my Mac Book were shut down. He tried a number of unsuccessful approaches before finally finding one that works: deleting the ~/Library/Metadata/Core Spotlight folder. That of course means that the Mac has to rebuild Spotlight, but he says two weeks later the issue hasn’t returned.

If you are happy to wait for your Spotlight data to be rebuilt, here’s how to delete the data: Open a Finder window, From the Go menu select Go to Folder…, Paste in: ~/Library/Metadata/Core Spotlight, CMD‑A to select all and then right‑click any item and select Move to Trash/Bin, Right‑click on the trash can and select Empty Trash/Bin, Confirm when prompted. If you’ve been experiencing this issue, please let us know in the comments whether this also works for you.