Macintosh rainbow cursor hell
Wednesday, May 11, 2016 by Dave Winer

A few days ago everything on my Mac got a lot slower. Lots of rainbow cursors. Esp when I do something that does stuff with disk. So launching the GitHub Mac client is excruciating. Dropbox is unusable. At first I thought it was Dropbox, but I haven't been running it here for days. The machine is still very bad. 

It's like that famous Mac-vs-PC commercial, only the Mac is behaving like the PC.

I don't have any ideas short of backing up the files and paving it.

Any suggestions please post on FB or send tweet to @davewiner.

PS: I kind of hope people will assume that since this has been going on for a few days that I've probably tried the obvious things. :-)

Update #1

I repaired permissions on the internal drive with Disk Utility, but that didn't help, so I rebooted and the machine became unusable. So I rebooted again and again, no help. So then I decided to reinstall the OS on the internal drive. No help. So I installed the OS on the internal SSD drive. And now it runs smooth. Unfortunately now none of my apps are installed. That's okay. I've gotten new computers before. It's actually kind of nice. And it performs crisply.