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Just as a sample, it took 1 min to write that question title because after 2-3 keystrokes, the beachball would show up. With the Yosemite upgrade my MacBook Pro was OK but after El Capitan I started noticing the slowness but it was still ok. Now with Sierra upgrade, my MacBook Pro (mid-2012) has become completely unusable. A spinning beachball now shows up after just 3 key strokes, 3-5 seconds before the menu opens on right click, even watching a video now is an impossible task. How do i fix? Is there a way to find the OS X installer and go back to to an older OS version like Mavericks or Yosemite? Or any other suggestion? The etrecheck report is given below. Any advice or suggestion will be highly welcome. EtreCheck - Report generated 2016-11-13
This is a known issue with this series with the HD SATA cable. Apple has been replacing them for free. I would strongly recommend you visit an Apple Store or Authorized Service Center to have your system looked at. I would wait until you get the HD SATA cable checked before doing these: Your HD may need repairs. Do you have an external bootable drive? If not do you have a friend who has a Mac system which you can connect your system to using a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable in Target Mode? If you do you should be able to run Disk Utility to check your drive.Often after upgrading the hard drive tend to get more fragmented. You’ll want to free up as much space as you can. I strongly recommend you leave around 1/4 of the drive free before running a defragmentation program. To start off I recommend deleting out the Cache & Log files. Here’s a tool that makes quick work off it: Disk Doctor. The defrag tool I use is this one: Drive Genius
As a programmer with thirty years of Mac experience, I don’t see what the slowness of an OS has to with all that is mentioned above. The cause is simply that the OS was written by idiots. Software shouldn’t be slow under any circumstances. And if the software is, the engineers don’t know what they are doing.
This answer is completely absurd. Macbook Pro Mid 2012 does not have HD Sata cables. Furthermore you NEVER defrag a solid-state drive as it is not good for the life of the drive and is discouraged by the manufacturer.
