Later Macs and the Spinning Beach Ball

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Hello, I am new; hence, I may be in the wrong forum. I have a much discussed subject (I think), but a new (maybe), question related to it. I have a Mac Pro (1.1), which works fine, except for the naughty beach ball. I believe that I have tried most everything found on the web (mainly application removal), to no avail. In some instances, I get temporary relief, never permanent. While typing this post I am constantly interrupted every five seconds, or so.

My Mac tells me that it will not take an upgrade from the 10.7.5 (Lion), that I am running. I am not looking for further solutions of the removal, or upgrade type. I have to believe that Apple took care of this issue at some point along the Mac line. My question is: At what "series point," and after is this no longer a problem?

Thank you from a newbie to the forum, but not a newbie in life.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Your Mac Pro 1.1 was released in 2006 so age is setting in.

What is important is this the 2.66Ghz model or the slower 2GHz? Also how much memory is installed and how full is the boot drive? You can 'hack' to allow later operating systems but this comes with some risk of turning it into a door stop. MacRumours deal with this more nthan is done here.
 

pigoo3

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2017 15" MBP, 16gig ram, 1TB SSD, OS 10.15
The spinning beach ball is mainly a computer perfomance issue (CPU performance, GPU performance, logic board design, amount of RAM, etc.).

As member harryb mentioned...your Mac Pro 1,1 is from 2006 (12 years old). You're going to run into performace issues with any 12 year old computer.;)

- Nick
 

Rod


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Your Mac's Specs
2021 M1 MacBook Pro 14" macOS 14.4.1, Mid 2010MacBook 13" iPhone 13 Pro max, iPad 6, Apple Watch SE.
Sad to say the spinning beach ball is a graphic representation of you computer saying, "I'm trying".
With only 2-2.66 Gb of Random Access Memory (RAM) your device is going to struggle with memory to perform even simple tasks.
Try not to run more than two applications at a time and check your storage to see if it's reaching capacity. Your computer will use storage as "virtual memory" (RAM) when pushed beyond its resources.
There are no easy answers to your problem, problems that have been solved by apple in later models and operating systems.
I would advise that you backup your device using the built in Time Machine application with a view to migrating any valuable files to a newer machine when you current one dies which it will inevitably do.
In the mean time remove or disable any background apps that may be running and minimize resource requirements by only running one or two apps at a time.
 
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Hello, I am new; hence, I may be in the wrong forum. I have a much discussed subject (I think), but a new (maybe), question related to it. I have a Mac Pro (1.1), which works fine, except for the naughty beach ball.

At what "series point," and after is this no longer a problem?

No version of the Macintosh operating system EVER intrinsically had a rotating beachball problem.

Has your Mac Pro always had this problem, or is it just recent? If the problem is just recent, then unless you are running software that you didn't run previously, the problem isn't with the specifications of your machine. (i.e. if your Mac ever ran just fine with the amount of RAM currently installed, and with the same exact software setup, then the problem isn't suddenly that you need more RAM.)

How full is your hard drive and what is it's total capacity? A boot (startup) hard drive that is around 80% full or more is, for all intents and purposes, FULL, and will cause your Mac to run poorly and can even lead to data loss.

Have you run Hardware Test? Have you run Disk Utility/Repair Disk?

For lots of potential help, see:

Macintosh Beachballs!
Macintosh OS X Beachballs!
 

Rod


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2021 M1 MacBook Pro 14" macOS 14.4.1, Mid 2010MacBook 13" iPhone 13 Pro max, iPad 6, Apple Watch SE.
Yes, thanks Randy, I should have included a definition of "nearly full" storage in my reply >20% free is advisable.
 
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Yes, thanks Randy, I should have included a definition of "nearly full" storage in my reply >20% free is advisable.

Yes, that's a very rough rule of thumb, but not a hard rule.

I've seen hard drives that were less than 60% full that were so fragmented that they were virtually full, and I've seen hard drives that were over 90% full that were still running fine.

The thing that is actually important is how much free *continuous space* there is on a rotating disk hard drive for the Mac's system to work with.

Macintosh Routine Maintenance
Macintosh OS X Beachballs!
Item #5 and Note #1
 

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