Appendix B. Troubleshooting
Whether it’s a car engine or an operating system, anything with several thousand parts can develop the occasional technical hiccup. MacOS is far more resilient than its predecessors, but it’s still a complex system with the potential for occasional glitches.
Most freaky little glitches go away if you just try these two steps, one at a time:
Quit and restart the wayward program.
Log out and log back in again.
It’s the other problems that’ll drive you batty.
Slowdowns and Fans
The biggest complaint you’re likely to have about macOS Sierra comes right after you install it. Suddenly, the Mac slows to a crawl—and its fans are going so hard, it’s alarmingly loud.
It’s a feature, not a bug. And it will go away in about a day.
When you upgrade to Sierra, the Mac re-indexes your drive so that Spotlight and Siri can use it to find your files. Indexing a drive can take a very long time, especially on big drives. Just let it run its course.
The enhanced Photos app may also share the blame. It likes to scan and study every single photo on your Mac so that it can learn the faces of the people you take pictures of. This, too, takes time (and is quite processor intensive).
Minor Eccentric Behavior
All kinds of glitches may befall you, occasionally, in macOS. A menu doesn’t open when you click it. A program doesn’t open—it just bounces in the Dock a couple of times and then stops. A program freezes.
When a single program is acting up like this, but quitting and restarting it does ...
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