


Other times, the application will become persistently unresponsive and 'hang'. Sometimes it will last only a few seconds and disappear when processing cycles are freed up and the application is ready to process further tasks. Naturally, it will freeze and stop responding - which results in the spinning wheel. The spinning wheel of death appears as a sign that an application is trying to deal with more processes than it can handle at the moment. Why does my Mac have a spinning color wheel? Usually, it’s due to a specific app not responding that a spinning wheel is triggered.

Known as a rainbow wheel, spinning beach ball of death, or SBBOD, its official name is the Spinning Wait Cursor, and it’s a system indicator signifying that macOS cannot handle all the tasks given to it at this moment.
