Don’t install Sonoma. My keyboard quit working (second time). First install was a nightmare, lost docs, other issues. Took several hours with Mac rep to almost fix it. And this is spooky. While attempting to fix, my list of passwords mysteriously appeared. This can’t happen without asking for it a entering a password. Also during that time, a friend called me to return a call which I never made. No record on my phone of any such call. By now everybody probably thinks I’m crazy. Bit frankly the way Apple has constructed a interconnected spider web of devices, preferences, etc. It was only a matter of time.
Even if I really wanted to use Sonoma, I would wait until it had gone through several updates, or even wait until the final version before the release of MacOS Pelican Bay or whatever they decide to call the next one.
For several weeks Sonoma had been running smoothly for me on a 2019 iMac. Yesterday I shutdown the iMac due to local thunderstorms. This morning it was very slow to boot up. I got a brief message about verifying Onedrive (which I didn’t think I had activated) and eventually the home screen appeared. Then every app was very slow to run.
I tried running Disk Utility on the boot disk (from Recovery Mode). That seemed OK but on the restart the Mac froze. I found I needed to Erase the (1Tb) boot drive and reinstall Sonoma. Now it is restoring my settings and data from a Time Machine backup over several hours. Hopefully that will have fixed the issue.
I guess this could have happened under Mojave or Ventura - my previous macOSs on this machine - but just wanted to alert people to a possible issue with Sonoma. If it happens again I will try to revert to Ventura.
I suppose next step would be to replace the SSD!
It’s unlikely that the SSD broke just by shutting down the iMac. (and if did, that’s a motherboard replacement). Did you simply shut down the iMac or did you unplug it - or is the iMac on a surge protector?
I did a normal shutdown.
The system now boots to Sonoma and my settings & data have been restored but the computer is still very, very slow.
Just tried resetting PRAM and it doesn’t seem to have made a difference.
Will keep trying a few things. Might try reverting to Ventura next.
Have a look at Activity Monitor. Probably you will see what is running constantly and taking most cpu time, slowing your Mac. My guess is whatever glitch caused your other issues also corrupted your caches, or even led to your System marking itself as not yet optimized. If this is correct, all you need to do now is wait for the rebuild/optimization to complete. I suspect with Sonoma rebuild/optimization may take days, weeks or longer.
About the time Sonoma was released I updated my Mac Pro (2019) from Monterey to Ventura. Optimization took a while but finished, but ever since Photos and various demons have been running when I am not actively typing, often saturating my (12 core) cpu and heavily using my gpu. When I press a key, after a delay this background processing stops and the computer can be used normally. If your iMac runs an Intel processor it presumably will do these same things but take even longer than my Mac Pro. While background processing continues, your Mac may seem slow.
Slow performance due to background processing is an old Mac story. Another old story is that as better newer hardware tends to increase performance, Apple burdens the system with more background activity. As Apple’s installed base converts from Intel to Apple Silicon, Apple is adding more and more background processing. The type of much additional processing is AI/ML, for which Apple Silicon is optimized. Apple on Intel can do this, but much more slowly. I think this is what I have seen over the last few weeks after updating my Intel Mac Pro to Ventura.
No, but since so many people have upgraded to Sonoma and been running it without any issues for months now, there’s undoubtedly something that’s seriously screwy on your Mac. If you have a technically savvy friend or family member (or trusted consultant), it might be worth getting them to take a look too, since phone support is never going to be as helpful as someone sitting there with you.
The strange thing was that Activity Monitor did not show any high use of resources. I managed to reinstall Ventura,after erasing internal drive for the second time, and the system was better (than Sonoma) but still slow. I realise that background activity might have been slowing things but it remained unworkable. I still suspect the internal SSD is misbehaving.
Rather than invest in an expensive new iMac (with half the storage of the current iMac!) I have purchased a UHD 4K monitor and hooked it up to my M2 Macbook Air running Sonoma using a USB-c cable.
The Macbook is running in clamshell mode and I have an external mouse & keyboard so it feels like the iMac. Now I have a workable, responsive office computer setup and can play with the old (2019!) iMac to try and figure out the problems.
When I eventually, maybe, buy an M3 iMac (27"/32"?) next year then the monitor will move to our loungeroom and be the secondary display for the Apple TV (main display is a projector).
Ta. I will try it but the issue doesn’t seem to be related to power. A long time ago I had an iMac with similar, intermittent nuisance issues. It died not long after that!
I breathed a sigh of relief when I successfully upgraded the 2019 iMac from Mojave to Ventura. Maybe Sonoma was a bridge too far?
I had a problem that apparently others have had. If you have your home folder on another disk, and also use iCloud Drive, then all sorts of bad things happen, like not being able to open files from the menu, large folders not opening and system settings hanging. Found out that the solution was to turn off iCloud Drive, but only found that from the internet and Apple have known about this from late September.