mac-ops

Helps with

Slow Mac that used to be fast — bloat accumulation across the four startup mechanisms (Login Items, ~/Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchDaemons). The same machine still boots fast once those are inventoried and trimmed.

Failing drives that nobody's spotted yet. macOS doesn't shout the way Windows does — IO errors live in log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.iokit"' and APFS surfaces them via AppleAPFSContainerScheme / AppleNVMe* provider messages. Healthy SSDs produce zero of these per month; dozens means active failure even when "About This Mac → Storage" still shows green.

Kernel panics with no obvious cause. The .panic / .ips files in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ carry the panic string, kernel call stack, and (critically) the loaded kext list. A panic mentioning a third-party kext (com.eltima.ProductX, com.paragon.NTFS, anti-virus drivers) tells a completely different story than a panic in core Apple code (AppleIntelKBL Graphics, IOPlatformPluginUtil).

"My Mac is slow" diagnosed by chasing the wrong symptom. Activity Monitor shows what's running NOW; log show shows what failed at boot, what's been panicking, and what storage / power events preceded each freeze. Always audit before treating.

Apps that "don't work right" but aren't crashing — usually a TCC (Transparency, Consent, Control) denial nobody explicitly clicked No to. Screen Recording, Accessibility, Full Disk Access, Camera, Microphone, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Photos, Automation — each has its own permission grant. Reading the TCC databases tells you exactly what's been denied and when.

"Macintosh HD is full but I deleted everything" — APFS local Time Machine snapshots plus purgeable space breakdowns. tmutil listlocalsnapshots / and diskutil apfs list reveal the actual space accounting that Finder hides.

Mac waking up at 3am for no apparent reason. pmset -g log records every wake with a reason string (UserActivity, BT.HID, EHC0, RTC, Maintenance). The pattern across a week tells you whether it's the keyboard, a Bluetooth peer, a kext, or scheduled maintenance.

mds_stores / mdworker_shared / photoanalysisd / cloudd / bird chewing CPU. Each has a specific cause (Spotlight reindex on a new volume, Photos analyzing faces, iCloud Drive metadata sync) and a specific remedy (per-volume mdutil control, throttling, or waiting it out informedly).