I also used to have the same issue, but somehow it just gone after a month. You can try boot your mac into safe mode then go back to normal, work for me
Your night shift works? I can’t disable it half the time. And yes, I disabled “Enable until tomorrow”. It’s ridiculous.
I had a much better experience on every other macOS from the past few years. Every update seems to make it worse somehow, lol.
Try a clean install? I found Sonoma buggy on my MBP after I updated it initially (when it was in Beta) but it is much more stable now, a clean install on mine fixed any lingering weirdness I was experiencing.
I agree with this. I have a M2 Air and haven’t ran into issues
The settings I’m sorta okay with since I’m more used to using iPadOS but then I’ve always just searched the setting that I need to fix rather than click menus
I prefer having a sidebar for the settings, instead of having to go back every time I want to change settings in a different category.
I also find it easier to adjust iCloud settings.
Other than that, it’s basically the same settings as before with a new interface.
Fair enough with the sidebar, but it frustrates me that it is not alphabetical. It all seems so much more laborious however: arranging displays now takes three clicks rather than the one it used to take, for example.
Several of the issues listed seem to be related to search.
One thing that can happen from time to time, is that the search index gets corrupted or damaged in some way.
Forcing it to be re-indexed can often help: [https://support.apple.com/102321](https://support.apple.com/102321)
As for display settings, I've come to adore [BetterDisplay](https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay), as it provides everything I need in a nice convenient menu.
Spotlight has gotten noticeably worse than it used to be. It's slow and the results you want aren't often the top. It reminds me of Windows search behavior in lots of ways. Not picking up app names until you type the first 4 characters but not 3, things like that.
Alfred is a good alternative and you can specify what it indexes. I don’t use Spotlight almost at all anymore unless I’m doing actual file search. For finding apps and docs Alfred is instant
That gets me wondering. Where did the notion that searching the Internet and searching locally are interchangeable come from? I know it started on the Mac with Sherlock search in Mac OS 8.
Is it rooted in the idea that our computers are nothing more than a portal to access the web? That makes sense on something like a Chromebook or an iPad, but not so much on a Mac.
Trust me dude, I’ve reindexed my spotlight like 5 times at this point using terminal. Yet, the problem always comes back. It’s a known bug. I even removed some of the results like it says in the link you provided, but it still manages to fuck up. I’ve had it not be able to find Safari and suggest searching “Safari” with Google using Safari. It’s absurd.
Depending on what you use I think the index sometimes messes up because of the machines insistence on keeping everything in the cloud instead of on a physical drive. I noticed when I can’t find something in Spotlight it’s because it’s in the cloud. When I download the file it magically appears in spotlight. I find this not only incredibly annoying but counterproductive to my work. The general insistence that everything be on the cloud rather than directly on the drive means that the speed and efficiency of the computing is dependent on the Internet connection rather than the nearly instantaneous connection to the hard drive. This drives me absolutely freaking bonkers all the time
In that case you're far more likely to achieve something by using [https://feedback.apple.com/](https://feedback.apple.com/) than complaining to a bunch of strangers on Reddit.
The weird thing about Spotlight for me is that it works on my external backup drives but not on my local HD. So I can sort of use it, very clumsily, by seeing the path of my backup file and then manually navigating to it in my finder. Ridiculous.
Actually, it isn't quite as strange as it may seem.
The way Spotlight works, is by saving an index on each volume. This is easily visible if you for example have an ExFAT volume that you move between a Mac and a Windows computer. On the Windows computer, if you show invisible items, you will see a bunch of extra folders. One of them contains the Spotlight index for that volume.
In your case, it is possible that some other software may be screwing with the index on your internal drive. I wonder if the likes of Dropbox or Google Drive might be inadvertently causing problems since they keep trying to get full disk access. (I never allow this, as there is no reason for it.)
Normally these don't access the Time Machine drive, so it wouldn't be affected in the same way.
I've NEVER been able to use spotlight correctly. It can never search individual folders or volumes well, once i ask it to look in a more specified place than just the entirety of everywhere the whole thing goes haywire. always been an ieeus for me, not just on sonoma.
The settings rant you're having. I'm having the same, and more. The network being splited in two is another aberration from this OS.
Sonoma has been a pain in the ass for any person with any decent amount of common sense.
At least for the System settings part.
macOS was the fastest new macOS with the best looking interface. After that they got sloppy and lazy, throwing things in for no good reason. Sonoma hangs a lot for me which I hate and many programs are buggy. I don’t know if it’s the program or operating system.
I have the same issue. I have to restart my Mac mini at least 2 to 3 times per week because it freezes up. This wasn’t a problem previously. I also have to dump the cache in Safari every couple weeks because it also quits working if I don’t.
The settings app is obnoxious, and the ever-increasing number of always-running processes with little or no documentation is unsettling.
It starts to feel like it's just Windows with more aesthetic consistency.
Apple have been in crisis mode trying to deal with some major issue that Sonoma has with Mobile Device Management software which leaves Mac’s with a blank screen since Christmas and only got it under control in the last couple of months.
All QoL issues have been on the back burner during this so they haven’t been addressed, now Apple is pushing hard for New AI features in the next version of macOS so it is very likely Sonoma is a write off as these issues will never be resolved.
Sonoma is utterly terrible. It absolutely breaks any external storage (especially PCIe storage cards in Mac Pros) and this is 100% confirmed a Sonoma “bug” with how it handles drivers. Downgrading to Ventura fixes the issue. There’s forums dedicated to this with thousands affected, but Apple don’t care:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255339675
I don't like the iPad style settings menu, and for some reason having a default dynamic wallpaper was driving my CPU usage to 100% with no other window/app open.
I don't really understand what's going on with this. Lots of people, including myself, haven't had any problems with Sonoma. Others though, say that they do. You'd think that because the OS is the same and the hardware is (basically) the same we'd have the same experience. Like, I have the same laptop as the OP running the same OS and I don't have the same problems. I'm not sure what to make of it.
I also use Xcode, which requires latest macOS to develop for iOS 17. Trust me, I’d downgrade right now if Apple didn’t have to make things so difficult.
Same for me, usability is awful. I have similar issues to you. I can’t even get my Mac Studio to turn off. It will reboot instead, even when telling it to turn off. The user interface, and wording, are awful. I, like you, would love to use Sierra, instead of the crap Sonoma is.
Yeah, but the r/apple cult does not allow you to say that loud. I tried it, it broke everything, and I went back to Ventura. IMHO they mispelled Sodoma as Sonoma.
You know, I've been thinking about doing the same. The past two OS releases have offered nothing of value for me.
Do I care about Stage Manager? No.
Do I care about desktop widgets? Hell no!
Did I care about being able to launch login items as hidden? Yes!!! And they removed the ability to do that in Ventura!
I feel like people just gets unlucky to be the one with some specific issues, wheras others don't, or have different problems. Perhaps it is your particular install that went wrong somewhere, at some point. It has been a great time for me since Monterey to Ventura, and now enjoying Sonoma without any hiccups. Maybe a reinstallation of macOS may solve your issues? But that is likely to not be viable...I'm not sure if you'd have a better solution🤔
I find Sonoma to be better on a M1 16Gb.
I don’t have any of the issues you have.
In fact issues I used to have been fixed in Sonoma.
I agree with others I don’t like the new settings app.
I’m dislike it too. Probably because I made a big jump in OS but the big hassle for me is “file not found” errors at start up that DONT TELL YOU WHAT FILE CANT BE FOUND.
Not gonna lie, I have an absolutely irrational hatred of the new system preferences. It's not a fucking phone. I would gladly have the person who thought it was a good idea executed for crimes against humanity.
No it's awesome for me! Even on my 2013 MacBook Pro!
My ONLY complaint is that the responsiveness of the system menu bar is slightly but noticeably slower than before. Even on my Apple Silicon machines, the menu bar is just a bit slower: it can't quite keep up with the mouse cursor at 120 FPS, whereas in Monterey and Ventura, it had zero trouble. It's not an issue except for the fact that there's no technical reason why it should have slowed down.
Everything else is A++.
I can't rely on sleep mode. SOMETHING runs in the background that doesn't show up on the activity monitor and burns thru the battery within a few hours.
Yep. I downgraded back down to Monterey. Was the only one that was confirmed to work flawlessly and I typically need it 5-6 days a week. Sonoma was awful and unusable for me in after effects.
Yeah I saw this version as a downgrade so I never updated and probably never will, you just confirmed what I feared. Apple has changed. Essentially you pay for a faster computer so they can extract more data from you, the user became the commodity, the computer is the tool to control you and the funny thing is we agreed to it and even threw our own money at it.
Cue "everything is perfect" apologists. Yes, it's true, Sonoma is the world's first perfect OS! Bug free! No issues for me! OP must be Holding It Wrong!
Sigh.
Spotlight is just very, *very* slow now (and sometimes just stops working but that's another classic Apple forever-bug). System Preferences is a total joke yes, but that happened in Ventura. Yes, the speed decrease for HDMI hot-plug and display reformat from Monterey to Sonoma is catastrophic - it's almost as slow as the 2019 i7 this M1 Pro replaced now, but under Monterey was near-instant. The displays would still be waking up with the windows etc. already arranged on them. With Sonoma, it's just still sluggishly trying to find its ass with both hands and sometimes will just get it all wrong for shits and giggles, leaving windows scattered on the wrong screens (bug acknowledged by Apple in Feedback Assistant during Sonoma point-zero beta cycle ("...the HPD (Plug event) ... arrives after the system woken up completely ... thus doing a full Plug-in sequence"). Then they started ghosting me on requested-by-them updates, shipped the OS with the bug and it's been fucked since. Fucking top quality, Apple. Class fucking act).
Force Eject of external devices has been iffy forever, but the additional USB bugs introduced by Sonoma (the clown car developers of Apple showing their colours most visibly with the 14.4.0 debacle) make it more likely to happen.
Yes, it's all dumbed down "OS operated with one finger and drool" shit from Photoshop monkeys who can barely use iOS and to whom the concept of an efficient, experienced user of a real computer with multiple input methods (keyboard plus modifier keys plus pointing device) is a completely foreign concept.
Anything on iOS that involves doing more than one thing at a time is a total chore - multiple item operations are basically a nightmare. That's gradually becoming a macOS thing as it gets more and more dumbed down by the idiot designers. And then there are the bugs; despite the functionality gradually getting more and more basic, the software gets slower and slower, and more and more buggy.
We're now at the point where significant issues arise in macOS quite often and "reinstall the OS" is the recommended resolution on Reddit a good chunk of the time. Remind anyone of Windows, much?
i thought that i was going insane with this spotlight search bug but thank fucking god i'm not the only one. after updating to sonoma i literally can't find anything half of the time. tried reindexing everything and still when i'm typing 'notes' or 'calendar' in the search bar i find everything but apps themselves. and yes — new settings are barely usable
-Music App crashes on a regular basis.
-Used to be able to airdrop hundreds of photos. Can't anymore.
-Copy/Paste between apps & devices intermittently fails.
-Photos App crashes easily.
So yeah, it has problems.
Sonoma has too many things going on that tend to interfere with each other that makes it a pain and they revamped the window context system so now it takes longer to switch tasks like different applications or windows.
I was a Mac user from way back in the early 90s. I used a PC the last few years for work, so I just came back to Mac with an MBP M2. Sonoma was shocking to me, how IOS-ified it has become, especially the system prefs becoming system settings. Its awful. Disappointing.
i think that sonoma is less buggy than ventura. it kinda ironed down the bugs that ventura had. it is not perfect. the last version of macOS that was great (on M-series Macs) is monterey.
M2 MacBook Pro
Spotlight never works for me. Only right after refreshing search index, but the next day it doesn’t. It doesn’t even find like the standard apps like safari
I use m3 pro since nov. 2023 and didn’t have any problems with Spotlight, QuickTime or Finder. Also force quit works just fine for me. Recently I installed VLC Player to substitute QuickTime player but just because I receive a lot of videos with multiple formats.
Settings are horrible, Spotlight often shows 0 results (use devon easyfind instead), spotlight shows developer results and can only be excluded if you install xcode (or fake it with „sudo touch xcode.app“), dragging 10‘000 files at once makes finder crash, external display support is horrible if not an apple display
I donot use native app from Apple that much, Spotlight alternative I use is Alfred; I do not use quick time, install iina for quick video check up, and I have Infuse for episodes and films; I use System Settings by right click the icon on dock lmao, I use Alfred ejection to eject drives or unmount dmgs.
I only have issues with adobe creative cloud not working properly on sonoma. Rest is fine. How is system preferences neutered? … ok it’s a pita to find where everything is, but beside that what do you miss?
I tried custom keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard setting only to find that the key overrides the other default … so if you put „paste“ on F13, cmd + v doesent work anymore
Most of our 30+ art workers hate with a passion, and some of them are hardcore Apple fans. Not happy bunnies. Doesn't bother me.
But they won't fix it, just churn out the next OS to make another bunch of hardware incompatible.
Widgets that disappear as soon as they loose contact to iPhone/iPad. Like you have to add them again makes it useless. Low battery icon stuck on Find My widget but when you open the app it looks fine. M1 Max Studio but both Safari and Arc keep stuttering sometimes, i usually run a “clean memory” that fixes it but never happened before as I can remember.
It made my 2020 Intel air unusable due to performance issues. Literally unusable, I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Downgraded to ventura and it's awesome now.
Absolutely. Fans going full blast for no reasons. Just with 3-5 tabs of Safari running. That’s my last Intel MBA.
On the other hand, my mini running Monterey is so fine.
Sonoma has been better for me than Ventura. System Settings still sucks.
These terminal commands disable Spotlight, reset it, and restart it:
sudo mdutil -a -i off
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -a -i on
sudo mdutil -E
That worked for me. It wouldn’t hurt to do a quick reinstall of Sonoma either, have you tried that yet?
Indexing has not worked on Sonoma since a few Mac builds back, Ie tried all of the suggestions in support websites, total screwup on Mac OS, I run a studio and had to upgrade for running my digital recording system, but don’t have Apple Care, so downloaded #findanyfile from the App Store which is a lame workaround for Spotlight
It’s stable on my M3. If force quit and eject are hanging that suggests to me that there are read/write operations timing out l, maybe some issue with a storage device, network storage, or a USB hub.
I will say though I’ve been using Spotlight for 20 years and it has seemingly never returned a complete set of results! I’d really love to know why providing a searchable index of file names seems to be such an intractable problem for Apple. (Yes I know it tries to do a lot more than that but I’ve since given up.)
> Is macOS Sonoma fucking horrible for anyone else?
Not for me.
> Spotlight … QuickTime …
No problems there.
> System Preferences have been neutered…
I’ve found exactly 1 missing feature — one can no longer manually adjust the priority of Wi-Fi networks. You now need to use the command line for that. (Also true in Ventura.)
> Finder search doesn't show relevant results,
It does for me.
> can't turn off Night Shift…
Night Shift was originally introduced with the claim that it “may help you get a better nights sleep.”
We now know otherwise because: [Science](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/04/byu-night-shift)!
> force quit doesn't actually quit a hanging application
Works for me.
> Like I can click FORCE EJECT and nothing will happen.
Works for me.
**You might be proceeding from a false assumption.**
1. Observation: Sonoma works poorly on my Mac.
2. Assumption: Sonoma is a raging dumpster fire.
If I had the kind of of issue you describe, I’d:
1. Write down a list of every issue. Include any necessary steps to recreate the problem.
2. Schedule a Genius Bart appointment with Apple.
There could be a hardware problem with your Mac, or it could be a weird software glitch.
Do me a quick favor: Open terminal and type this command (followed by the Return key):
uptime
What is the output?
As I posted on another thread here, yes – Spotlight doesn't work properly. Either the index resists being rebuilt or it gets rebuilt and then ignored. Running the latest 14.4.1 on an M2.
I have an M1 MacBook Air 16gb and I suggest you to logout from your user and don’t “force eject” to expel an external memory. I have the same frustrating issue.
My m2 base MacBook Air is working just fine on Sonoma, as well as my relatives M1 MBA (base model) and M1 Mac Mini (base model). Only thing I’ve noticed is possibly a bit more battery drain than I had on Ventura but that may be from just using more apps and different apps not being fully optimized
It's not "fucking horrible" but, I will say that I've had Spotlight not find files for me that I know it should find and I've had to use the Finder's search feature to find them and then after that, they start showing up in Spotlight searches. Beyond that, it's been great. But, I do get tired of a new major version every year with machines that are about 10 years old getting dropped. They could slow down the pace of major releases a bit and focus on quality and supporting older hardware until it really is no longer viable.
Yep, I have the exact same problem with force close and force eject. Every single time I try to eject any drive, it doesn't, and when I force eject, it doesn't, so I just pull it out but then that makes recently added files either hidden or have a weird date issue that I have to fix in Terminal. Also, while QuickTime player doesn't crash for me, I have noticed that it will just randomly skip sections when I'm recording audio, or even worse, be very slightly sped up, which is awful when I'm recording a 6 hour D&D session and I can't figure out why the start of the audio lines up with the video but the end doesn't.
I think it’s amazing and moving to search more and more with each os. Command + Space and type in what you want. Screensaver, mouse, iCloud…. It’s all in spotlight:)
No problems from me on two macs, one an M2 MBA and the other an iMac 2017 running with OCLP. If I were you, I would reload the os.
Also, while I understand your frustration, the "fucking this" and "shit that" doesn't help make your case.
Since I’m completely unaware of what you’re using as a configuration I can’t answer. In my personal experience I’ve had no problems with any of the issues you’re describing. I’m using the m2 mini with 8gb RAM/256gb storage.
Ive had no issues. Maybe try to reinstall fresh? Take a Time Machine backup and wipe your hard drive and reinstall the OS and restore from Time Machine.
It's not just you. I have a similar experience with a different set of bugs. But my experience of using macOS is pretty shitty.
Its quality has been more or less steadily dropping for over a decade now, but it really went into freefall starting with Catalina and Sonoma is just the latest bad iteration, worse than the others. It sucks. I wish Apple still cared about software quality.
I swear to god. I’m on the verge of getting a new laptop. I have the MacBook Air M2 and it’s been acting like a windows from 1999 for the past few days!
I've been on Sonoma since it first came out and haven't had any problems. It actually fixed some issue I had with Ventura. I'm using a 2019 Macbook Pro 16.
I wiped my M1 and started all over. Initially I was on an upgrade from Monterey through Ventura on Time Machine that I moved into the M1. Better since.
So I’ve run into iCloud disk issues, I think, where my local hard drive is telling me I have more contents then physical
Space on the drive. Then I have almost
Nothing on the drive. I have not enabled documents in the cloud or drive optimization.
Sonoma is the buggiest macOS release I’ve used to date. There was a point where I couldn’t create folders when in the save file dialog, which was extremely annoying. There was another point where I couldn’t manage my storage in settings because the screen wouldn’t load. Since Monterrey, everything overall feels more laggy. I’m using an M1 MacBook Air with 16G ram.
Apple doesn’t support sonoma on my intel pro and I’ve gotta say I was surprised to see that it runs pretty much the same as Ventura. Even battery life is the same. Maybe try resetting if you’re running into so many issues.
I am on sonoma and have no issues (M1 Air 8gb). The settings suck tho.
One question, when you scrolling through sections like Desktop & Dock or Storage, do you experience choppy scrolling ?
I don’t, but I have m1 with 16gb
Confirming 16GB M1 nearly zero lag
Also confirmed. I have none of the OP’s issues on either the M1 Air 16GB, or the 2020 iMac.
I don’t, I have the 8gb version
no but it takes aprox. 500 ms to load these settings pages. But i also try to limit myself to my browser + 3-4 apps to keep performance up
I also used to have the same issue, but somehow it just gone after a month. You can try boot your mac into safe mode then go back to normal, work for me
Your night shift works? I can’t disable it half the time. And yes, I disabled “Enable until tomorrow”. It’s ridiculous. I had a much better experience on every other macOS from the past few years. Every update seems to make it worse somehow, lol.
yes, for me everything i need works
Try a clean install? I found Sonoma buggy on my MBP after I updated it initially (when it was in Beta) but it is much more stable now, a clean install on mine fixed any lingering weirdness I was experiencing.
I agree with this. I have a M2 Air and haven’t ran into issues The settings I’m sorta okay with since I’m more used to using iPadOS but then I’ve always just searched the setting that I need to fix rather than click menus
I prefer the new settings
they look more modern, but they are a mess
Why? What about them do you like?
I prefer having a sidebar for the settings, instead of having to go back every time I want to change settings in a different category. I also find it easier to adjust iCloud settings. Other than that, it’s basically the same settings as before with a new interface.
Fair enough with the sidebar, but it frustrates me that it is not alphabetical. It all seems so much more laborious however: arranging displays now takes three clicks rather than the one it used to take, for example.
The new settings are head and shoulders above the old ones.
But some settings are so hidden or not existent.
The new settings app is terrible!
Every time I open it requires using Google
Right? We spend thousands to get the same UI as a couple hundred dollar iPad? I hate it.
I hope they really get their act together. The last 5? Releases were all mediocre at best.
Several of the issues listed seem to be related to search. One thing that can happen from time to time, is that the search index gets corrupted or damaged in some way. Forcing it to be re-indexed can often help: [https://support.apple.com/102321](https://support.apple.com/102321) As for display settings, I've come to adore [BetterDisplay](https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay), as it provides everything I need in a nice convenient menu.
Spotlight has gotten noticeably worse than it used to be. It's slow and the results you want aren't often the top. It reminds me of Windows search behavior in lots of ways. Not picking up app names until you type the first 4 characters but not 3, things like that.
Alfred is a good alternative and you can specify what it indexes. I don’t use Spotlight almost at all anymore unless I’m doing actual file search. For finding apps and docs Alfred is instant
I turned off web search in spotlight because I was getting garbage webpages instead of the app I was searching for. It’s still slow but helped a bit
That gets me wondering. Where did the notion that searching the Internet and searching locally are interchangeable come from? I know it started on the Mac with Sherlock search in Mac OS 8. Is it rooted in the idea that our computers are nothing more than a portal to access the web? That makes sense on something like a Chromebook or an iPad, but not so much on a Mac.
Trust me dude, I’ve reindexed my spotlight like 5 times at this point using terminal. Yet, the problem always comes back. It’s a known bug. I even removed some of the results like it says in the link you provided, but it still manages to fuck up. I’ve had it not be able to find Safari and suggest searching “Safari” with Google using Safari. It’s absurd.
Depending on what you use I think the index sometimes messes up because of the machines insistence on keeping everything in the cloud instead of on a physical drive. I noticed when I can’t find something in Spotlight it’s because it’s in the cloud. When I download the file it magically appears in spotlight. I find this not only incredibly annoying but counterproductive to my work. The general insistence that everything be on the cloud rather than directly on the drive means that the speed and efficiency of the computing is dependent on the Internet connection rather than the nearly instantaneous connection to the hard drive. This drives me absolutely freaking bonkers all the time
In that case you're far more likely to achieve something by using [https://feedback.apple.com/](https://feedback.apple.com/) than complaining to a bunch of strangers on Reddit.
[удалено]
Would a spotlight alternative like Alfred help the situation?
Good chance yeah. Just give Alfred or Raycast a shot and you'll stop worrying about the mess Spotlight is
The weird thing about Spotlight for me is that it works on my external backup drives but not on my local HD. So I can sort of use it, very clumsily, by seeing the path of my backup file and then manually navigating to it in my finder. Ridiculous.
Actually, it isn't quite as strange as it may seem. The way Spotlight works, is by saving an index on each volume. This is easily visible if you for example have an ExFAT volume that you move between a Mac and a Windows computer. On the Windows computer, if you show invisible items, you will see a bunch of extra folders. One of them contains the Spotlight index for that volume. In your case, it is possible that some other software may be screwing with the index on your internal drive. I wonder if the likes of Dropbox or Google Drive might be inadvertently causing problems since they keep trying to get full disk access. (I never allow this, as there is no reason for it.) Normally these don't access the Time Machine drive, so it wouldn't be affected in the same way.
I've NEVER been able to use spotlight correctly. It can never search individual folders or volumes well, once i ask it to look in a more specified place than just the entirety of everywhere the whole thing goes haywire. always been an ieeus for me, not just on sonoma.
Holy crap, yes! My Downloads can’t be searched but no matter what external drive I attach, that external source is perfectly searched. It’s maddening.
I’m using Sonoma on my M1 Pro MacBook and have zero issues so far.
Same
Same here with make and everything. Guess we lucky
The settings rant you're having. I'm having the same, and more. The network being splited in two is another aberration from this OS. Sonoma has been a pain in the ass for any person with any decent amount of common sense. At least for the System settings part.
The search for settings doesent even work properly
Yes the network info should be together. I have a long time finding anything particularly if I can’t remember what it’s called to search for it.
macOS was the fastest new macOS with the best looking interface. After that they got sloppy and lazy, throwing things in for no good reason. Sonoma hangs a lot for me which I hate and many programs are buggy. I don’t know if it’s the program or operating system.
I have the same issue. I have to restart my Mac mini at least 2 to 3 times per week because it freezes up. This wasn’t a problem previously. I also have to dump the cache in Safari every couple weeks because it also quits working if I don’t.
I’ve begun just regularly rebooting just to give myself the peace of mind that it fixes the bugs but never really does.
Still surprised how they made settings that bad, it's sluggish, not intuitive and super hard to use comparing to catalina
Feels like UX/UI by Apple is being done by juniors or some outsourced contractors. Some iOS bugs in UI are migrating through multiple major updates.
The settings app is obnoxious, and the ever-increasing number of always-running processes with little or no documentation is unsettling. It starts to feel like it's just Windows with more aesthetic consistency.
I think Apple software is becoming more and more windows-like with every update. Not impressed by the latest couple of releases of Mac or iOS.
Windows 10 runs better on my 2017 MacBook Pro than Sonoma does on my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro…
Yeah... the whole "it just works" thing hasn't been working out very well these days. Nothing really serious, just little things, but it's irritating.
MacOS has been bad since Mojave.
Mojave was the last good version that i had used personally.
I had no issues on Catalina!
MBA with M3... No problems at all with Sonoma.
You'd think that by this time Apple would have fixed all the things that are wrong with Sonoma.
Apple have been in crisis mode trying to deal with some major issue that Sonoma has with Mobile Device Management software which leaves Mac’s with a blank screen since Christmas and only got it under control in the last couple of months. All QoL issues have been on the back burner during this so they haven’t been addressed, now Apple is pushing hard for New AI features in the next version of macOS so it is very likely Sonoma is a write off as these issues will never be resolved.
MDM totally fine for me since the upgrade
You’d think so right, but no. I’ve had the night shift bug since day one of using Sonoma. Every update doesn’t fix it.
Sonoma is utterly terrible. It absolutely breaks any external storage (especially PCIe storage cards in Mac Pros) and this is 100% confirmed a Sonoma “bug” with how it handles drivers. Downgrading to Ventura fixes the issue. There’s forums dedicated to this with thousands affected, but Apple don’t care: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255339675
This was my issue for a long time. Ventura was perfect. I had to take my MBP '21 to Apple for them to wipe my laptop and install Sonoma. Just chaos
I don't like the iPad style settings menu, and for some reason having a default dynamic wallpaper was driving my CPU usage to 100% with no other window/app open.
It’s terrible. The dumbing down of the UI is very irritating.
I don't really understand what's going on with this. Lots of people, including myself, haven't had any problems with Sonoma. Others though, say that they do. You'd think that because the OS is the same and the hardware is (basically) the same we'd have the same experience. Like, I have the same laptop as the OP running the same OS and I don't have the same problems. I'm not sure what to make of it.
Probably. Things always go wrong for someone out there. Seems you really like Mojave, so I'd go with that. Why torture yourself?
I also use Xcode, which requires latest macOS to develop for iOS 17. Trust me, I’d downgrade right now if Apple didn’t have to make things so difficult.
Cuz it’s a pain in the ass to downgrade a Mac. If you’ve ever downgraded one without a Time Machine backup you know what I mean.
Either way, you can’t boot anything earlier than Big Sur on M-series Macs, so you’re stuck I guess
You’re right, I’m mistaken. It’s been over 2 years since I’ve been on it so I guess I forgot what was the earliest macOS I can use.
I got memory leaks with the Screen Lock and some other things... Also the dock disappearing when connecting new external displays.. Quite annoying.
Same for me, usability is awful. I have similar issues to you. I can’t even get my Mac Studio to turn off. It will reboot instead, even when telling it to turn off. The user interface, and wording, are awful. I, like you, would love to use Sierra, instead of the crap Sonoma is.
macOS Sodoma
macOS Condom, Ya
Yeah, but the r/apple cult does not allow you to say that loud. I tried it, it broke everything, and I went back to Ventura. IMHO they mispelled Sodoma as Sonoma.
That subreddit is just for rumors and “news”
No this subreddit is for fanboys to loudly proclaim that their ~~computer~~ status symbol is working fine and that OP is "holding it wrong"
For me and my friends. All back to Monterey.
You know, I've been thinking about doing the same. The past two OS releases have offered nothing of value for me. Do I care about Stage Manager? No. Do I care about desktop widgets? Hell no! Did I care about being able to launch login items as hidden? Yes!!! And they removed the ability to do that in Ventura!
I feel like people just gets unlucky to be the one with some specific issues, wheras others don't, or have different problems. Perhaps it is your particular install that went wrong somewhere, at some point. It has been a great time for me since Monterey to Ventura, and now enjoying Sonoma without any hiccups. Maybe a reinstallation of macOS may solve your issues? But that is likely to not be viable...I'm not sure if you'd have a better solution🤔
I find mines is very stable. Settings however I find myself having to search for things I can't seem to find in the menus.
My MBP M1 has brozen many times when mirroring videos from YTB to the TV. It’s terrible!
I find Sonoma to be better on a M1 16Gb. I don’t have any of the issues you have. In fact issues I used to have been fixed in Sonoma. I agree with others I don’t like the new settings app.
What does your indexing settings look like? Do you have anything ticked off in Settings > Siri and Spotlight > Search Results?
I’m dislike it too. Probably because I made a big jump in OS but the big hassle for me is “file not found” errors at start up that DONT TELL YOU WHAT FILE CANT BE FOUND.
Sonoma was awful. Try Monterey.
fuck recent mac os’s in general
Not gonna lie, I have an absolutely irrational hatred of the new system preferences. It's not a fucking phone. I would gladly have the person who thought it was a good idea executed for crimes against humanity.
No it's awesome for me! Even on my 2013 MacBook Pro! My ONLY complaint is that the responsiveness of the system menu bar is slightly but noticeably slower than before. Even on my Apple Silicon machines, the menu bar is just a bit slower: it can't quite keep up with the mouse cursor at 120 FPS, whereas in Monterey and Ventura, it had zero trouble. It's not an issue except for the fact that there's no technical reason why it should have slowed down. Everything else is A++.
I’ve got a death grip on Monterey until the walls fall down.
I can't rely on sleep mode. SOMETHING runs in the background that doesn't show up on the activity monitor and burns thru the battery within a few hours.
No issues, Mac Air M2.
Yep. I downgraded back down to Monterey. Was the only one that was confirmed to work flawlessly and I typically need it 5-6 days a week. Sonoma was awful and unusable for me in after effects.
Only finding what I am looking for in settings. Other than that it’s been solid for me.
Switching Spaces is still a huge buggy mess.
Yeah I saw this version as a downgrade so I never updated and probably never will, you just confirmed what I feared. Apple has changed. Essentially you pay for a faster computer so they can extract more data from you, the user became the commodity, the computer is the tool to control you and the funny thing is we agreed to it and even threw our own money at it.
Nope. Working perfectly.
I love it. Zero issues.
Yes, it's seriously f-ing horrible for me, too.
Cue "everything is perfect" apologists. Yes, it's true, Sonoma is the world's first perfect OS! Bug free! No issues for me! OP must be Holding It Wrong! Sigh. Spotlight is just very, *very* slow now (and sometimes just stops working but that's another classic Apple forever-bug). System Preferences is a total joke yes, but that happened in Ventura. Yes, the speed decrease for HDMI hot-plug and display reformat from Monterey to Sonoma is catastrophic - it's almost as slow as the 2019 i7 this M1 Pro replaced now, but under Monterey was near-instant. The displays would still be waking up with the windows etc. already arranged on them. With Sonoma, it's just still sluggishly trying to find its ass with both hands and sometimes will just get it all wrong for shits and giggles, leaving windows scattered on the wrong screens (bug acknowledged by Apple in Feedback Assistant during Sonoma point-zero beta cycle ("...the HPD (Plug event) ... arrives after the system woken up completely ... thus doing a full Plug-in sequence"). Then they started ghosting me on requested-by-them updates, shipped the OS with the bug and it's been fucked since. Fucking top quality, Apple. Class fucking act). Force Eject of external devices has been iffy forever, but the additional USB bugs introduced by Sonoma (the clown car developers of Apple showing their colours most visibly with the 14.4.0 debacle) make it more likely to happen. Yes, it's all dumbed down "OS operated with one finger and drool" shit from Photoshop monkeys who can barely use iOS and to whom the concept of an efficient, experienced user of a real computer with multiple input methods (keyboard plus modifier keys plus pointing device) is a completely foreign concept. Anything on iOS that involves doing more than one thing at a time is a total chore - multiple item operations are basically a nightmare. That's gradually becoming a macOS thing as it gets more and more dumbed down by the idiot designers. And then there are the bugs; despite the functionality gradually getting more and more basic, the software gets slower and slower, and more and more buggy. We're now at the point where significant issues arise in macOS quite often and "reinstall the OS" is the recommended resolution on Reddit a good chunk of the time. Remind anyone of Windows, much?
Well said
Yes I have been experience video playback glitches. Hopefully they fix this soon otherwise I have to find a way to downgrade.
Exactly why I stopped updating. Can’t even remember what California town name I’m on now, and I don’t give two shits.
only because of these system settings i decided to downgrade to monterey. in macos 12 settings work as it should
Yeah not a rock solid release, this one. Sys Prefs app crashed on me the other day and ever since all the icons in it are blank.
i thought that i was going insane with this spotlight search bug but thank fucking god i'm not the only one. after updating to sonoma i literally can't find anything half of the time. tried reindexing everything and still when i'm typing 'notes' or 'calendar' in the search bar i find everything but apps themselves. and yes — new settings are barely usable
I thought I was the only one, it’s such a mess. I came to Mac to get away from being frustrated using windows.
-Music App crashes on a regular basis. -Used to be able to airdrop hundreds of photos. Can't anymore. -Copy/Paste between apps & devices intermittently fails. -Photos App crashes easily. So yeah, it has problems.
Sonoma has too many things going on that tend to interfere with each other that makes it a pain and they revamped the window context system so now it takes longer to switch tasks like different applications or windows.
I’m glad I didn’t update my M1 Pro from Monterey. I was thinking about it
I miss so much Snow Loepard
It is definitely the buggiest macos I can remember. And I started with Panther.
I was a Mac user from way back in the early 90s. I used a PC the last few years for work, so I just came back to Mac with an MBP M2. Sonoma was shocking to me, how IOS-ified it has become, especially the system prefs becoming system settings. Its awful. Disappointing.
I thought only airdrop sucks for me lol.
No issues at all. At least not like yours
i think that sonoma is less buggy than ventura. it kinda ironed down the bugs that ventura had. it is not perfect. the last version of macOS that was great (on M-series Macs) is monterey.
Sounds like you skipped Ventura and are now just learning the new system settings
The 110B stock buyback will fix it.
I would still use Panther or Leopard if I could.
Never in my life have I had so many native applications (created by Apple) have so many bugs. This shit is literally bloatware.
It’s not that bad for me but buggier compared to Monterey which I came from
No issues on my M1 Mac Mini. I do use Alfred rather than Spotlight, so can't comment on that. Agree the settings app is terrible, though.
M2 Air and works like a charm
M2 MacBook Pro Spotlight never works for me. Only right after refreshing search index, but the next day it doesn’t. It doesn’t even find like the standard apps like safari
I have a Mac Mini M1 and iMessage won’t stay signed in.
Recommend (strongly) that you backup w/Time Machine, reboot holding the power button down to get into Startup Options, then erase/reinstall.
No issues in my MBP M2 but I threw spotlight and use Alfred instead. 1000 times better.
Slownoma as I’ve started to call it. Guess it’s designed for Apple silicon. Everything works but zzzzzzz
stellar witticism
I use m3 pro since nov. 2023 and didn’t have any problems with Spotlight, QuickTime or Finder. Also force quit works just fine for me. Recently I installed VLC Player to substitute QuickTime player but just because I receive a lot of videos with multiple formats.
Settings are horrible, Spotlight often shows 0 results (use devon easyfind instead), spotlight shows developer results and can only be excluded if you install xcode (or fake it with „sudo touch xcode.app“), dragging 10‘000 files at once makes finder crash, external display support is horrible if not an apple display
I donot use native app from Apple that much, Spotlight alternative I use is Alfred; I do not use quick time, install iina for quick video check up, and I have Infuse for episodes and films; I use System Settings by right click the icon on dock lmao, I use Alfred ejection to eject drives or unmount dmgs.
I only have issues with adobe creative cloud not working properly on sonoma. Rest is fine. How is system preferences neutered? … ok it’s a pita to find where everything is, but beside that what do you miss?
I tried custom keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard setting only to find that the key overrides the other default … so if you put „paste“ on F13, cmd + v doesent work anymore
I’m also experiencing Spotlight be semi-useless for several months now. But that’s really it as far as issues go on my end.
It’s been a dream for me, with somewhat heavy graphics work to boot. You could always try wiping and starting over.
Most of our 30+ art workers hate with a passion, and some of them are hardcore Apple fans. Not happy bunnies. Doesn't bother me. But they won't fix it, just churn out the next OS to make another bunch of hardware incompatible.
Widgets that disappear as soon as they loose contact to iPhone/iPad. Like you have to add them again makes it useless. Low battery icon stuck on Find My widget but when you open the app it looks fine. M1 Max Studio but both Safari and Arc keep stuttering sometimes, i usually run a “clean memory” that fixes it but never happened before as I can remember.
TBH, the whole idea of making MacOS look like iOS is terrifying for me.
It made my 2020 Intel air unusable due to performance issues. Literally unusable, I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Downgraded to ventura and it's awesome now.
Absolutely. Fans going full blast for no reasons. Just with 3-5 tabs of Safari running. That’s my last Intel MBA. On the other hand, my mini running Monterey is so fine.
I’m getting a lot of bugs on my m3 Mac that I wouldn’t expect to be there in a release version of Mac OS. Things like copy / paste doesn’t work
Sonoma has been better for me than Ventura. System Settings still sucks. These terminal commands disable Spotlight, reset it, and restart it: sudo mdutil -a -i off sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight* sudo mdutil -a -i on sudo mdutil -E That worked for me. It wouldn’t hurt to do a quick reinstall of Sonoma either, have you tried that yet?
Don't even try Universal Control, which has been broken since it came out, but somehow Apple made it worse in Sonoma.
Indexing has not worked on Sonoma since a few Mac builds back, Ie tried all of the suggestions in support websites, total screwup on Mac OS, I run a studio and had to upgrade for running my digital recording system, but don’t have Apple Care, so downloaded #findanyfile from the App Store which is a lame workaround for Spotlight
It’s stable on my M3. If force quit and eject are hanging that suggests to me that there are read/write operations timing out l, maybe some issue with a storage device, network storage, or a USB hub. I will say though I’ve been using Spotlight for 20 years and it has seemingly never returned a complete set of results! I’d really love to know why providing a searchable index of file names seems to be such an intractable problem for Apple. (Yes I know it tries to do a lot more than that but I’ve since given up.)
Sonoma doesn't have bugs or lags like others. So far, I have not faced any issues.
> Is macOS Sonoma fucking horrible for anyone else? Not for me. > Spotlight … QuickTime … No problems there. > System Preferences have been neutered… I’ve found exactly 1 missing feature — one can no longer manually adjust the priority of Wi-Fi networks. You now need to use the command line for that. (Also true in Ventura.) > Finder search doesn't show relevant results, It does for me. > can't turn off Night Shift… Night Shift was originally introduced with the claim that it “may help you get a better nights sleep.” We now know otherwise because: [Science](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/04/byu-night-shift)! > force quit doesn't actually quit a hanging application Works for me. > Like I can click FORCE EJECT and nothing will happen. Works for me. **You might be proceeding from a false assumption.** 1. Observation: Sonoma works poorly on my Mac. 2. Assumption: Sonoma is a raging dumpster fire. If I had the kind of of issue you describe, I’d: 1. Write down a list of every issue. Include any necessary steps to recreate the problem. 2. Schedule a Genius Bart appointment with Apple. There could be a hardware problem with your Mac, or it could be a weird software glitch. Do me a quick favor: Open terminal and type this command (followed by the Return key): uptime What is the output?
As I posted on another thread here, yes – Spotlight doesn't work properly. Either the index resists being rebuilt or it gets rebuilt and then ignored. Running the latest 14.4.1 on an M2.
All those things you said that don't work for you? They all work for me.
I’m on Sonoma on my 2020 Mac book pro Intel non m1. i5, 16gb ram. Seems fine to me. I haven’t experienced any of the issues you described yet.
I have an M1 MacBook Air 16gb and I suggest you to logout from your user and don’t “force eject” to expel an external memory. I have the same frustrating issue.
Coffee Lake Hackintosh here; Sonoma runs fine 🫡
since big sure there has been nothing necessary, only nice to have. use vlc, its the best and it works (always)
I have had no issues with M3 in Sonoma.
It works fine for me. It's just the settings app that sucks
My m2 base MacBook Air is working just fine on Sonoma, as well as my relatives M1 MBA (base model) and M1 Mac Mini (base model). Only thing I’ve noticed is possibly a bit more battery drain than I had on Ventura but that may be from just using more apps and different apps not being fully optimized
No issues. I very much like the new running app window organization.
Sonoma is the best OS so far. You probably has some problem on your computer installing something.
It's not "fucking horrible" but, I will say that I've had Spotlight not find files for me that I know it should find and I've had to use the Finder's search feature to find them and then after that, they start showing up in Spotlight searches. Beyond that, it's been great. But, I do get tired of a new major version every year with machines that are about 10 years old getting dropped. They could slow down the pace of major releases a bit and focus on quality and supporting older hardware until it really is no longer viable.
Yep, I have the exact same problem with force close and force eject. Every single time I try to eject any drive, it doesn't, and when I force eject, it doesn't, so I just pull it out but then that makes recently added files either hidden or have a weird date issue that I have to fix in Terminal. Also, while QuickTime player doesn't crash for me, I have noticed that it will just randomly skip sections when I'm recording audio, or even worse, be very slightly sped up, which is awful when I'm recording a 6 hour D&D session and I can't figure out why the start of the audio lines up with the video but the end doesn't.
[I Fixed my spotlight from this video](https://youtu.be/2UoJPRpn8XA?si=Mrjf3bcS9au-Q0PU)
I think it’s amazing and moving to search more and more with each os. Command + Space and type in what you want. Screensaver, mouse, iCloud…. It’s all in spotlight:)
I'm on Sonoma and Finder locks up frequently and has to be relaunched. Then it's fine. I've just learned to live with it.
My only complaint is that horrible System Prefs window.
did you do a clean install?
No problems from me on two macs, one an M2 MBA and the other an iMac 2017 running with OCLP. If I were you, I would reload the os. Also, while I understand your frustration, the "fucking this" and "shit that" doesn't help make your case.
No, it works fine on my M1 MacBook Pro 16GB.
Agree with all those Spotlight can be fixed by forgetting it exists and using Find Any File
TELL ME ABOUT IT. Sonoma is trash, and the ariels are so annoying, like they look good but they make login SO SLOW
Having used macs since Mavericks (2013), I definitely see a sharp decline of OSX. Sonoma being the worst of them so far.
😭 typed like a real crybaby
Since I’m completely unaware of what you’re using as a configuration I can’t answer. In my personal experience I’ve had no problems with any of the issues you’re describing. I’m using the m2 mini with 8gb RAM/256gb storage.
Ive had no issues. Maybe try to reinstall fresh? Take a Time Machine backup and wipe your hard drive and reinstall the OS and restore from Time Machine.
It’s been fine on both my personal MacBook Pro (M1, 8GB) and work MacBook Pro (M2 Max, 32GB).
I freaking love my m2 pro Mac mini with Sonoma. Maybe if you would say nicer things about it it would perform better
Focus is broken. It goes from what I need it to to do not disturb to nothing randomly all day.
It's not just you. I have a similar experience with a different set of bugs. But my experience of using macOS is pretty shitty. Its quality has been more or less steadily dropping for over a decade now, but it really went into freefall starting with Catalina and Sonoma is just the latest bad iteration, worse than the others. It sucks. I wish Apple still cared about software quality.
I'm using Sonoma on my M3 Max MacBook Pro and no issues so far
3 different Apple keyboards at my office have stopped working on just the Sonoma Mac 🙃
Never had any issues
Running Sonoma on Mac Studio M1 Max without any of the issue you described. P.S. I'm not a fan either for the new System Preferences
I swear to god. I’m on the verge of getting a new laptop. I have the MacBook Air M2 and it’s been acting like a windows from 1999 for the past few days!
Sometimes the safari becomes as unresponsive as hell that i have to force stop it on the activity monitor
No issues on my M1 pro macbook
Yes! The most recent update messed mine up so badly that I had to wipe everything and set it to the previous version. I refuse to update again.
I've been on Sonoma since it first came out and haven't had any problems. It actually fixed some issue I had with Ventura. I'm using a 2019 Macbook Pro 16.
not horrible, but the performance has been worsened with the update. The mouse seem less smooth and the OS in general seems to be a bit slower
I wiped my M1 and started all over. Initially I was on an upgrade from Monterey through Ventura on Time Machine that I moved into the M1. Better since.
So I’ve run into iCloud disk issues, I think, where my local hard drive is telling me I have more contents then physical Space on the drive. Then I have almost Nothing on the drive. I have not enabled documents in the cloud or drive optimization.
Love it so far. I only upgrade to it because of the performance improvement, and it does serve me well. Suck to be you, though.
Im on Catalina, no idea 😬
How much RAM and how big is the SSD? How much storage is available?
Sonoma is the buggiest macOS release I’ve used to date. There was a point where I couldn’t create folders when in the save file dialog, which was extremely annoying. There was another point where I couldn’t manage my storage in settings because the screen wouldn’t load. Since Monterrey, everything overall feels more laggy. I’m using an M1 MacBook Air with 16G ram.
No issues on my M3 Pro MacBook
Mine is fine.
Apple doesn’t support sonoma on my intel pro and I’ve gotta say I was surprised to see that it runs pretty much the same as Ventura. Even battery life is the same. Maybe try resetting if you’re running into so many issues.