I installed macOS 27 Golden Gate, and my Mac has been noticeably slower than it was on the stable version of macOS Tahoe.
Apps take longer to open, switching between windows sometimes lags, and the system occasionally becomes unresponsive for a few seconds.
Is this normal after a major macOS upgrade, or should the performance have settled down by now?
I had a similar experience after upgrading. My Mac was noticeably slower for the first couple of days, but some of the problem was also that I had very little free storage left.
Major macOS upgrades can leave behind temporary files, caches, old installers, and other unnecessary files, which can make an already crowded drive worse.
You can check your available storage first. As for me, I used iBoysoft Cleaner to scan for junk files and large unnecessary files and free up some storage.
After cleaning things up and restarting, my Mac felt much more responsive. Just make sure you don’t delete anything important, and I’d still wait a few days for background indexing to finish before assuming Golden Gate itself is the problem.
That can be normal for the first few days after a major macOS upgrade. Your Mac may still be busy with Spotlight indexing, Photos analysis, iCloud syncing, and other background optimization tasks.
Check Activity Monitor to see if processes such as mds, mdworker, or photoanalysisd are using a lot of CPU.
I’d give it another day or two. If the slowdowns continue after that, restart your Mac, make sure Golden Gate and your apps are fully updated, and check whether a particular app or process is consuming excessive CPU or memory.
Since Golden Gate is a new macOS release, some performance issues may also be caused by app compatibility or system bugs.