macOS 27 is so buggy

Some Mac users who have recently installed MacOS 27 Golden Gate have noticed an unusually laggy and buggy experience with Mission Control, full screen apps, and Stage Manager.

Impacted users complain of a slow lag, delay, or stutter before entering Mission Control and/or Stage Manager, or swiping between spaces or full screen apps, flickering thumbnails, black or empty spaces when switching between them or when using multiple displays, window thumbnails failing to draw, frame rate issues, animation issues and stuttering, or even a complete lack of animations and a sluggish redrawing of the screen elements. These problems may be due to an incompatibility, or perhaps even bug in Mission Control and/or Stage Manager, or even WindowServer, as these features are reported to have been quite smooth and consistent visually for most MacOS users until they installed MacOS 27. It’s also conceivable that these type of visual hiccups and performance issues will resolve themselves over time as MacOS Golden Gate has finished indexing itself and performing background tasks, in a similar way that sometimes just waiting can help to resolve battery life issues experienced with MacOS 27.

If you’re experiencing issues with Mission Control, swiping between full screen apps and spaces, using Stage Manager, and interactions within these features, you’re not alone, and there may be some tweaks and adjustments you can make to improve the performance of these features.

Tips to Help Buggy, Laggy, Slow, Mission Control, Spaces, & Stage Manager on MacOS 27 Golden Gate

The following adjustments may help improve the performance of Mission Control, swipe gestures, full screen apps, and Stage Manager on macOS Golden Gate;

1. Turn off transparency – go to  Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Display and toggle on “Reduce Transparency” to disable transparency wherever possible in the interface



2. Turn off auto-hiding Dock – go to  Apple menu > System Settings > Desktop & Dock > turn Auto-Hide Dock to OFF



3. Turn off animations and motion – go to  Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion to ON, this turns the motion animations into transitions whenever possible



4. Install all available MacOS updates – System Settings > General > Software Update, and install any available MacOS updates
5. Be mindful of videos & animations – try to avoid leaving playing animations, gifs, and videos open when using Mission Control and Stage Manager, as they consume a lot of system resources to maintain in the background
6. Update apps – if you notice sluggish performance in one particular app mostly, it’s also possible that particular app has an issue or bug, and that simply updating that app may resolve slow and laggy behavior when interacting with that app in Mission Control or Stage Manager
7. Be mindful of background activity – if you recently installed MacOS 27 or an update, be aware that background indexing and housekeeping tasks will run for several days, which can impact system performance and fluidity of the interface until those tasks complete

Some of the frustration expressed by users is due to the unexpected nature of performance bugs like this, particularly because MacOS 27 Golden Gate has so many other examples of performance improvements, and general improvements to other features, like Spotlight and general search. These users often report that Mission Control and Stage Manager were fluid and responsive in earlier versions of MacOS, but feel it has degraded in MacOS 27 Golden Gate. Whether or not these complaints are due to the standard background activity that runs post-OS update is unclear.

For me personally, I have noticed in some heavy usage situations that Mission Control and Stage Manager can both be peculiarly laggy if there are many apps and browser windows open, but especially if any of those windows or apps have a video or multimedia playing. For example, leaving iMessage open with an animated gif and animated message background, both seem to significantly impact performance (to be clear, this is not specific to Golden Gate and this slow Messages issue has been explored before, and GIFs and Stickers are often the culprit). By toggling “Reduce Transparency” on, there has been a notable improvement to speed and performance. Installing MacOS 27.0.1 did not seem to make any difference for me or others who report the sluggish performance of these window management features, but I would not be surprised if these type of performance issues were fixed in a future software update.

How widespread these Mission Control and Stage Manager performance issues are is not entirely clear, but there are a good number of complaints specifically about this on various Apple Discussion forums, Reddit threads, and HackerNews posts, suggesting a reasonable number of people are impacted.

Have you experienced any unusual performance issues, sluggishness, bugs, or other issues with Mission Control, Stage Manager, Spaces, and full screen apps, since installing MacOS 27 Golden Gate? Did the above tricks help you? Did you find another solution? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.