MacBook Air M2: Lagging, full screen window issues after macOS 27 update

I have a Macbook Air M2 and I updated to MacOS 27 Golden Gate. Unfortunately, the first 2 days have not been as pleasant as all 3,5 years before have been. There is some lagging and seems like bugs. Here are a few of them:

When using full screen windows, I swipe up with three fingers to see the desktop and the menu bar on bottom. Few things here:
1. If I click on the desktop, it just jumps to the last active full screen, e.g. back to Chrome, instead of to Desktop as it used to.
2. If I e.g. open System Settings, it jumps again back to Chrome (last active full screen) and it opens the settings in the background, so I have to swipe up again and click on the minimized system settings window.
3. When I swipe up and in the bar of full screen windows I see a very weird transition of selected windows, e.g. first there is a blue marker around the Chrome window (last active) and then there is this laggy transition to Desktop which is then marked blue.
When going totally up with the mouse, to see the nav bar, there is just this slight lag that wasn't there before, like a fraction of the second. Nothing big, but after 3,5 years of a very smooth experience, this is noticed.
That is a very subjective one, but still - the new battery symbol is not as nice as it used to be :D

Any of you notices some similar issues, especially on 1 and 2? On my Macbook Air there is a significant decrease in the "swiping between full screens" experience.

Posted on Sep 16, 2026 10:57 PM

1 reply

WheelieNick

Level 9 (74,110 points)

Sep 17, 2026 3:12 AM in response to TTeinstein17

Hi there,

see this

Instead of clicking the empty wallpaper area to get out of Mission Control, try explicitly clicking on the "Desktop 1" thumbnail at the very top bar of the screen.
If you need to open System Settings or other native utilities frequently, try opening them via Spotlight (Cmd + Space) while you are already looking at the standard Desktop space, rather than initiating the action inside the swiped-up Mission Control view.

You can often bypass this lag by forcing the Mac to use less complex UI rendering:

Open System Settings > Accessibility.
Click on Display.
Toggle on Reduce motion and Reduce transparency.
(This will drastically simplify the transition animations and should eliminate that jarring "fraction of a second" lag you mentioned when moving your mouse to reveal the top navigation bar).