Hi all,
I’m not technical at all, so apologies if I’m missing something obvious. Apple offered me the latest, fastest and richest macOS, and nothing told me it was still in beta, so I upgraded from Tahoe to GoldenGate 27.0.1. I now regret it bitterly.
Right after a restart everything is fine. A few hours later the Mac becomes sluggish:
- Apps freeze or lag
- The Dock magnification animation (the wave effect) stutters
- Everything freezes for a moment when I press Cmd+Tab
- The cursor often disappears for a few seconds
It ran smoothly on Tahoe.
My setup
- MacBook Air M4, 24 GB RAM
- About 25% storage free (377 GB used of 494 GB)
- Previous macOS: Tahoe
- Time Machine backups from before the upgrade
- Open apps: Outlook, Chrome (10 tabs), Notion (4 tabs), Claude, WhatsApp, Preview
Activity Monitor, sorted by % CPU, while the Mac is slow (screenshot attached)
- Google Chrome Helper (Aperitif Renderer): 326.3%
- kernel_task: 268.5% (52 h of CPU time)
- WindowServer: 93.8%
- OneDrive: 56.1%
- Google Chrome Helper (Aperitif Renderer): 7.9%
Memory looks fine: about 70% used, memory pressure around 36%, 6.8 GB compressed.
My questions
- Has anyone else seen this on 27.0.1, and is there a known cause? kernel_task and WindowServer seem very high to me.
- Is there a simple fix a beginner can try?
- Since I have a Time Machine backup from before the upgrade, what is the safest way to go back to Tahoe without losing recent files?
- Does anyone know if a fix is likely in the next update?
Thanks a lot!