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Question

Problem Indesign and MAC OS 26.01

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
October 1, 2025
5 replies
1841 views

Have other people experienced excessive slowness when opening and saving Indesign documents with Mac OS THOE? (My configuration: MAC STUDIO M2, 32 GB RAM)
Even when exporting documents to PDF, the ‘wheel’ spins for a long time.
Do you have any solutions?

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @bitdesign,

I just wanted to check in to see if you're still facing the slowness issue on macOS 26.01. If it's continuing, could you please share a short screen recording that shows the workflow, and what exactly triggers the delay when opening, saving, or exporting files? Once I have that, I'll review it closely with the team to investigate further.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

L

lexpink23

Participating Frequently

I'm still battling the same issues OP mentioned, plus lag when switching back and forth between windows (ie. copying from word, clicking into InDesign to paste). Has there been any updates or resolutions found yet? I just received a brand new (company issued) Macbook M4 Max that came with Tahoe and I use InDesign daily. Unfortunately, it's almost umbearable to work in at this point.

leo.r

Community Expert

If InDesign 2026 is already available in your country, I wonder if you have the same problem there? When you install InDesign 2026, make sure to choose the option to remove earlier versions.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Sorry to hear you're still experiencing slowness. Could you please check if the issue persists when launching your Mac in Safe Mode and testing from a new user account? This will help determine if the slowdown is linked to any third-party apps or user-specific settings.

If the problem continues, please share a short screen recording showing the delay when opening or saving a file, so I can review it and discuss it with the team.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

bitdesignAuthor

Participating Frequently

Just today, I tried to create a new user on Mac OS. The result is the same. InDesign is very slow. Photoshop freezes and you have to force quit. Acrobat Reader freezes or crashes.
To be able to work, I had to install version 25.12.4 of Photoshop, version 19.5.5 of InDesign and version 28.7.10 of Illustrator.
Acrobat Reader basically does not work: if you miraculously manage to open a document and close it by mistake, when you reopen it, everything freezes. And it is not possible to install an older version.
The most common icon in all Adobe applications is the Mac OS spinning wheel. The situation is very frustrating.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

bitdesignAuthor

Participating Frequently

I'm sorry to say this, but the Affinity suite doesn't have all these problems, and I'm seriously considering switching, because I haven't been able to work properly for 15 days.

G

Gia Ninja 2

Known Participant

Yes, I have this problem too its so slow and infuriating when you are trying to get a lot of work done whilst waiting for the spinning to stop before the file window opens in InDesign and you can navigate to where you are trying to go. Hope it gets sorted soon.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @bitdesign,

Adding to what the expert mentioned, could you also confirm which version of InDesign you are currently using? I'd also suggest testing the issue once in Safe Mode to rule out any third-party applications interfering, since we've seen a few similar cases with macOS Tahoe. You can find the steps here: https://adobe.ly/4o3vuUw.

Please give this a try and let me know your observations.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

bitdesignAuthor

Participating Frequently

The version I’m using is the latest available, InDesign 20.5, and I work on a Mac Studio M2 with 32 GB of RAM and a MacBook Air M4 with 32 GB of RAM. MAC OS X 26.01.
I’ll try your solution and let you know soon.

BobLevine

Community Expert

As I said earlier to another poster, Rule one is to never upgrade without testing. There's no way of knowing this early on whether this is an Adobe issue or an Apple issue. If it worked fine before the upgrade then I suggest using the full back up that you certainly should have made and roll back.

bitdesignAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for your reply. I had tested InDesign on the MacBook Air M3 with macOS 26.0 and it wasn’t that bad. So I trusted it…
InDesign’s behavior is still very strange:

1) If you export a PDF as “Interactive” it’s fast

2) If you export a PDF as “Print” it’s extremely slow
3) Opening a document is very slow.
4) Saving a document is very slow.
5) Importing an InDesign document into another document is very slow for the first page, but then it’s fast for the following pages.
6) It’s as if it needs to process some data before acting on the document.
7) Once it’s open, there are no issues while working on it
I8) tried disabling all the preflight checks when opening the file and also disabling the GPU, but nothing has improved. Let’s wait for better times ;O)))))

leo.r

Community Expert

By @bitdesign

Where are your links located - on a network server, cloud, or a local drive?

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