How often should I see the Apple spinning beach ball?

rewindrewind Posts: 2,636
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I bought my first Mac last year. I got the £999 mid 2012 model of the MacBook Pro. This is my first Mac and I was wondering how often you should see the spinning beach ball? I went into the calendar yesterday and tried to skip back to the year 2010. It took AGES with the spinning ball on screen throughout. Sometimes there are other elements that it appears as well (iPhoto, loading Microsoft Office sometimes).

Maybe I was expecting too much with a Mac (sold by the marketing!) and thinking everything would happen instantly. I know it signifies it is loading/working on something but I am just surprised when it appears on tasks I would class as quite simple.

How often do other people see the spinning ball?

Thanks.

Comments

  • rottweilerrottweiler Posts: 2,569
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    What spinning ball ?
  • StaunchyStaunchy Posts: 10,904
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    I have a Mac Mini and I see it regularly, maybe you notice it more because it stands out compared to Linux's or Windows' wait cursors. My iPhoto library is quite large so I'm not surprised to see it while that loads up but it's never excessive.

    With regards to expecting everything to happen instantly, it's not going to happen unless the application is already loaded into memory. A very simple small program will appear almost instantly but things like iPhoto and Office apps need to preload a lot of libraries before you can interact with them, navigating calendar will depend on the amount of data you have in it.
  • InkblotInkblot Posts: 26,889
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    Never had much of a problem with this on my Macbook Air. Two weeks ago I bought a bluetooth speaker to listen to my music library in the kitchen. Now, every time I switch on bluetooth I get spinning beachballs all over the place. Didn't realise bluetooth was such a drain on the computer's resources.
  • IvanIVIvanIV Posts: 30,300
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    But the laptop looks good :p Due to their release cycle they were never high-end specced laptops, always behind, not using the latest hardware available.
  • rottweilerrottweiler Posts: 2,569
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    This is true, they only have sandybridge i7's and ssd's

    So last century
  • IvanIVIvanIV Posts: 30,300
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    Now when they are around for a while. Wonder how fast they will have computers with Haswell.
  • Dark 1Dark 1 Posts: 4,088
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    The beach ball happens because a resource has become unavailable. In most circumstance this is because there's some bottleneck where the current process cannot continue until that resource has become available again.

    The most common resource bottleneck is the hard drive. Compared to the rest of the computer, a hard drive is very slow and if lots of apps or background tasks are demanding its attention at the same time, the beachball is how it lets you know its struggling.

    I have a little utility called MenuMeters installed. It shows you in the menu bar what your Mac is up to. So whenever the beachball cometh, I can see immediately what resource is clogged up, and 90+% of the time, it's the hard drive.

    Incidentally, SSDs suffer less from this simply because they are so much faster and can deal with simultatious tasks much better than HDs.
  • cnbcwatchercnbcwatcher Posts: 56,681
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    I see it on my Macbook Air quite a lot, but that's more to do with Firefox 20 being a RAM hog than anything else. Maybe I should change browsers.
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