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Wake from sleep - No wallpaper; no Dock; no Switcher; Finder glacially slow

GarryB

GarryB

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 2, 2015
57
28
Canberra, ACT, Australia
My Mac Studio has had problems with displaying the wallpaper on wake from sleep since new (Apr 2022). Since then some symptoms have gone and others arisen. At present on wake from sleep:
  • the Desktop is black i.e. no wallpaper;
  • the Dock, which is hidden, cannot be displayed;
  • the Switcher does not work;
  • Finder actions such as moving items on the Desktop are glacially slow.
Often, everything pops back to normal after a unpredictable amount of time. Sometimes, the only solution is to logoff and logon again. Sometimes, after a time, a shaded area appears on the Desktop, middle grey in colour sized about half of my 5120x2880 display in the top left quadrant. When that happens, the Dock can be displayed with cmd-d but it is displayed as if the shaded area was the Desktop i.e. about 25% up from the bottom and the display and about 75% of the width.

I've attached a capture showing the grey shaded area and weird Dock.

Relaunching Finder has no effect.

The Studio is a vanilla setup with no external monitors and just 2 external drives (SSD and HDD).

Has anyone seen anything like this mess ?


Desktop.png
 
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GarryB said:
Sometimes, after a time, a shaded area appears on the Desktop, middle grey in colour sized about half of my 5120x2880 display in the top left quadrant.
Click to expand...
GarryB said:
The Studio is a vanilla setup with no external monitors and just 2 external drives (SSD and HDD).

Has anyone seen anything like this mess ?
Click to expand...
I have not seen anything like this before. But I have to ask: If there are no external monitors....how can you see *anything*?
 
Oops, thanks. I do have a Studio Display. I usually don't think of it as an external display, which of course it is.

The disappearing wallpaper and Desktop weirdness has declined recently. Usually, on wake from sleep the wallpaper appears quite quickly. The problem seems to have been attenuated but not solved.
 
Have you tried booting without the external drives attached? Is it still under warranty?
 
ColdCase said:
Have you tried booting without the external drives attached? Is it still under warranty?
Click to expand...
Thanks. I do a cold boot every day with the external drives disconnected. Sometimes, I don't connect them during a session which includes periods of Sleep. I bought the Studio in April 2022 so, I guess it's out of warrantee.
BrianBaughn said:
Have you tried in a new, test user account with no third-party apps installed?
Click to expand...
Good idea. I have three user accounts and have only noticed the issue on one although, I can't remember the other two ever being left logged-on with the Studio in sleep mode.

Another idea is to transfer everything to a new user account but recreate all the macOS-related settings and preferences – assuming the cause is related to a macOS setting.
 
I have exactly the same issue as the OP with my Mac Studio (interestingly, also with an Apple Studio Display). Same randomness - sometimes it wakes fine, other times the same symptoms: black desktop, no dock and can't switch apps. The only reliable fix is to log out and in again, which is a pain. Disappointing for the old Apple hardware integrated with their OS. Don't they test these things? :-/
 
garth_h said:
I have exactly the same issue as the OP with my Mac Studio
Click to expand...
Many thanks for posting – it's a relief to know I'm not alone. I have used the "Feedback Assistant" app to send reports to Apple, usually after each dot-point macOS release. I first submitted a report in July 2022.

Frankly, I get the feeling that Apple have put Mac Studio and Studio Display maintenance onto the back-burner. The Display, because it runs a custom iOS, possibly requires a lot of work for just a single device that doesn't sell in big numbers.

Cheers.
 
I'm having this issue when I wake my Mac Mini M4 Pro from sleep. Lasts a minute and everything is OK again except of course drive icons are miss arranged to how I set them on Desktop –which also happens on a reboot.

*update I now have to logout/login to restore Desktop background, dock and ability to switch between workspaces.
 
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I've just updated my perfectly fine Macbook Pro M3 Pro to Sequioa 15.1.1 and have started experiencing this problem. Previously, on Senoma, 20 second launch to operating time. Now, I am having to wait between
3 to 4 minutes before my wallpaper and more importantly my dock reappears.

Has this been addressed by Apple? It's difficult to find any information regarding this exact problem.

Has there been a solution? Right now, I'm hoping that the next update will resolve the issue.
 
Could it have anything to do with (incorrect/buggy) swapping between disk and memory on wakeup?

I've never experienced this myself but it sounds exactly like my PC running out of physical memory in the middle of things. Display frozen, stuff disappearing, endless waiting on programs to fully come back, etc.
 
GarryB said:
My Mac Studio has had problems with displaying the wallpaper on wake from sleep since new (Apr 2022). Since then some symptoms have gone and others arisen. At present on wake from sleep:
  • the Desktop is black i.e. no wallpaper;
  • the Dock, which is hidden, cannot be displayed;
  • the Switcher does not work;
  • Finder actions such as moving items on the Desktop are glacially slow.
Often, everything pops back to normal after a unpredictable amount of time. Sometimes, the only solution is to logoff and logon again. Sometimes, after a time, a shaded area appears on the Desktop, middle grey in colour sized about half of my 5120x2880 display in the top left quadrant. When that happens, the Dock can be displayed with cmd-d but it is displayed as if the shaded area was the Desktop i.e. about 25% up from the bottom and the display and about 75% of the width.

I've attached a capture showing the grey shaded area and weird Dock.

Relaunching Finder has no effect.

The Studio is a vanilla setup with no external monitors and just 2 external drives (SSD and HDD).

Has anyone seen anything like this mess ?


View attachment 2362656
Click to expand...
I have a new Mac Mini 2024 (2TB storage and 32GB memory) with two new Studio Displays, and I am seeing the exact same issue.

Most of the time, the symptoms are mild (wallpaper not shown initially or a stuttering wallpaper animation, but usually loading after a few seconds), but sometimes, it lasts longer, and sometimes, it is so bad that I need to restart the Mac Mini to be able to use it.

The last occasion was the worst of all. This was after I had also connected a Macbook Air M1 via "Push through the edge of a display" so I could use mouse and keyboard across all three screens. After waking the Mac the next day (with the Macbook still off), it was complete chaos. The second screen remained predominantly black, the app switcher did not work, and windows were all over the place, similar to your image above, where only two-thirds of the screen was active. A restart resolved this, but the issue remains, even with "automatically reconnect to a nearby Mac..." disabled.

Just yesterday, without having connected the Macbook or changed anything, I had a similarly bad case with the wallpaper loading and animating smoothly right after wake, but after logging in using touchID, the desktop showing black, with the screen's active resolution displayed on only about two-thirds of the screen from the top left corner, and the dock showing way up.

I never had this with the Macbook Air using its built-in display, so it seems to be an external display issue, maybe Studio Display in particular.

Can anyone confirm this issue also happens with the Mac Mini or Mac Studio in combination with a generic display?
 
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There's an app on the AppStore called EtreCheck. It's donation-ware and very, very good. You might benefit from downloading it and let it do its scan - it can find all sorts of odd issues that might be causing these odd behaviours.
 
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