macOS Tahoe 26.1: Slow 'Save As' and 'Open' dialogs

After updating to macOS Tahoe 26.1, I started noticing a strange issue: the Finder and all applications run normally, but whenever any program needs to open a window — such as “Save As”, “Open”, choosing a folder, selecting a file, etc. — everything becomes extremely slow. The window takes a long time to appear and to load its contents. This happens in every application, not just Adobe software.

In the videos I recorded, you can clearly see this behaviour.

To try to resolve the situation, I entered macOS Recovery to reinstall the system. However, in the reinstall option only macOS Sequoia appears, not Tahoe. I’m not sure if this is normal or if Recovery should show the latest version installed on the Mac.

Even so, I manually reinstalled macOS Tahoe 26.1 hoping it would fix the issue. Unfortunately, nothing changed: the Finder and the apps themselves work fine, but any window that needs to be opened from within an application makes the system almost unusable.

At this point, I don’t know what might be causing this.

Should I proceed with a completely clean installation of macOS Tahoe, including formatting the entire drive of my MacBook Pro?

Thanks you for the attention

Videos

Posted on Nov 19, 2025 5:10 PM

Top-ranking reply

Juuggo Author

Level 1

6 points

Posted on Nov 23, 2025 11:29 AM

I finally managed to fix the issue. I had already tried this process before, but for some reason it didn’t work — it only worked on the fourth attempt, while my friend got it right on the first try.

Here’s what I did: opened Finder → Finder Settings, and under Sync Desktop and Documents folders, I unchecked that option. As soon as I turned it off, I noticed a difference. Then I restarted the Mac into Recovery Mode, opened Disk Utility, and ran First Aid on all the disks listed. It found and corrected two path errors (don’t ask me which ones!). After that, everything went back to normal.

I also noticed that, with that option enabled, I had lost automatic syncing between devices, and even my photo wasn’t showing in the App Store. Now that everything is back to normal, syncing is working again… but I no longer have access to the Desktop files from other devices.

This is probably something Apple will fix in a future update.

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20 replies

Owl-53

Level 10

102,193 points

Nov 22, 2025 10:12 AM in response to Juuggo

Let us first establish

We are still talking about the M- Class Apple silicon computer that appears in in your Etrecheck report earlier in your question Once that is confirmed or not confirmed.

We will then answer your other queries in above reply

We shall await the confirmation before moving forwards