Your Mac hijacking your cursor and asking you to wait is never welcome. People call it different things, including spinning wheel, beach ball or pinwheel of death.
The good news is that a spinning wheel means that macOS did not lock completely. You may be able to regain control.
What is the wheel of death spinning on a Mac?
This rainbow spinning wheel (whatever you want to call it) is a common macOS standby cursor. It fires when an application does not respond for a few seconds and signals that you must wait before giving further instructions to the application.
This should not be confused with the blue spinning wheel, which is also sometimes called the “JavaScript weather vane”. A blue wheel appears mainly in web content when running Java applications. It usually occurs when a website sends a standby command. It often appears in web applications, such as Google Sheets.
How to fix the wheel of death
A spinning wheel (or beach ball) is a signal from the operating system that an application is not behaving as it should. This is one of the best problems you can encounter because it probably means that your system is working well. It is probably just an application that is causing the problem. If you find the application and fix the problem, you will be satisfied.
With that in mind, let’s see how to find the application in question and how to get rid of the spinning wheel.
Find the application that is causing the problem
A spinning wheel usually means that macOS has detected a problem in a specific application. The good news is that it also means that the entire system (including the OS) has not crashed. In fact, a spinning wheel does not necessarily mean anything crashed (yet).
If it is still not obvious, you can find the application that is causing the problem by scrolling through those that are active. To do this, press Command + Tab or just click around the screen (the mouse should still work, even though the cursor has changed).
If you are unsure which application is causing the problem, Activity Monitor can help. You can start it by going to Applications> Utilities or looking for it in Spotlight. On the CPU tab, click on the “% CPU” column to organize the list by current system usage.
This puts the most thirsty apps at the top of the list. See if any are using more than their fair share of CPU resources. You can also see “(Not responding)” appended after the application name in the list. Resist to exit the app yet and move on to the next step.
Wait a minute
Often, the spinning wheel of death appears when an application is trying to do something. For example, it can appear when you are trying to render a video in an editing program or to perform batch edits in a photo editing application. It may even appear when you are connecting to a server in an online game.
In these cases, waiting is the best option. If you’ve already told an app to do something, you can also give it some time to finish the task. Sometimes, this is not something that you explicitly requested. For example, the macOS Photos application may be performing an image analysis on a set of photos that you recently imported.
Other applications should function normally during this period, assuming you are not placing the system under a huge load (such as rendering video or 3D models, for example). Stay away from the computer for a few minutes and let the Mac fix the problem.
Force quitting the problematic application
If you have waited a while for a task to complete, but the computer still does not respond, it may be a good idea to force shut down and restart the application. If you have unsaved data or jobs, you may lose them by doing so, so be sure to give the application enough time to recover.
You can try to terminate the application normally first. To do this, right click (or click with two fingers or press Control + Click) on its icon in the Dock and select Exit. The application may take a second to respond. However, by turning it off normally, you can avoid losing any unsaved work.
Unfortunately, this does not always work. You can also force an application to close by right clicking on its icon in the Dock, holding the Option key on the keyboard and selecting “Force Quit”.
Alternatively, you can start Activity Monitor, find the application, and then end the process from there.
When the problem application is closed, the wheel of death should disappear. You should now be able to reopen the app and try again.
Do you have a persistent weather vane? Restart your Mac
If the pinwheel refuses to disappear or reappears continuously, it is a good idea to restart the machine. Just click on the Apple logo, select “Restart” and wait. After the machine restarts, it should be fast and responsive, with no waiting cursors in sight.
Sometimes, your Mac may crash to the point where you cannot restart it using the Apple logo. If this happens (and you feel you’ve waited long enough for it to respond), press and hold the Mac’s power button (or the Touch ID button on some MacBooks) until it turns off.
This is the last resort for any serious system failure and you will lose any unsaved work on applications that are still running. If possible, save and close any applications that are still responding before attempting this step.
A frequent spinning wheel indicates other problems
It is reasonable to expect to see the wheel spinning from time to time, especially when dealing with resource-intensive applications. However, if you start to see it frequently and in a variety of applications, it could indicate a bigger problem.
In this case, the state of your system may be contributing to the instability of the software. A common cause is a lack of available storage. Your Mac needs free space to function. Both the operating system and third-party applications increase and decrease storage usage over time
So first, make sure your Mac has enough free space. Apple does not specify what the “right” amount of free space is. However, we recommend leaving about 10% of your primary disk space (about 20 GB on a 256 GB MacBook). This should be enough to keep the gears turning.
The lack of RAM can also cause the rotating pinwheel to appear regularly in memory-intensive applications. There’s not much you can do about it, unless you’re using an iMac, Mac mini, or Mac Pro that lets you upgrade memory.
RELATED: 10 ways to free up disk space on your Mac hard drive
Running Yosemite or earlier? Repair permissions
If you’re stuck on an older version of macOS, like 10.10 (OS X Yosemite) or earlier, try to repair the disk’s permissions if you see the wheel spinning frequently.
To find out which version of macOS you are running, click on the Apple logo in the upper left corner and select About this Mac. If it is version 10.11 or later, you can skip this section.
If you are working with version 10.10 or earlier, start Disk Utility by navigating to the Applications> Utilities folder or just search for it in Spotlight. Select the primary boot drive (usually called “Macintosh HD”) in the sidebar and click on “First Aid”. Let your Mac scan and repair any errors it finds.
This is not necessary in 10.11 (El Capitan) or later, as Apple introduced changes to the way the permission system works.
Beachball Be Gone!
Hopefully, these tips will give you a good idea of how to solve any future problems with the spinning wheel (or beach ball) of death.
However, remember that the only good thing about seeing the wheel spin is that the problem is probably an application. If you’re experiencing system-wide instability, however, you may want to learn how to fix a frozen Mac below.
RELATED: How to Fix a Frozen Mac