[ffitch]

A couple of years ago I noticed that my mac starts collecting weird little bugs if I don’t reboot for a really long time. The cursor starts misbehaving (it won’t reliably change over links, or in graphic editors), switching between apps might take a few seconds, and once I had my keyboard input latency increased by ~500-700ms for every keystroke. These issues go away on reboot. I’m trying rebooting once a week or so now.

[wishfish]

Can confirm. I have similar problems with very long uptimes on my MBA M1. By long, I mean two months or more. The most common recurring problem is the Mac forgetting it's connected to a monitor. But the problems are often very random. I've had most of the ones you described.

Though I shouldn't use the word "common" as the occurrences are rare. My guess is 4-6 times a year over the past five years. Would love to know what causes it but the randomness of the symptoms would make investigating a bit difficult.

[mrguyorama]

I can confirm this happened, at least in the past, with audio issues for me. If I didn't reboot recently, the audio would start stuttering under high CPU load, with lots of pops and crackles and junk.

This lasted many years, across multiple apple laptops, across multiple different OS versions, across multiple different Corporate management solutions!

Mac users, like Linux users, refuse to acknowledge that it can be possible for there to be a problem that they have not personally experienced. They never extend this doubt to problems on Windows.

This is why everyone believes Apple hardware is always flawless despite nearly every machine having serious design issues that hamper or even break the machine, like a display cable getting changed to be too short in a design update such that after a while your display goes really wonky in a way that is really difficult to google, such that your IT department wont figure out that it's a known and unfixed design fault, and spend weeks trying to reinstall the OS and other troubleshooting steps.

[bethekidyouwant]

does logging out fix it?

[gwbas1c]

Uhm, do you have a virus or other spyware?

[ffitch]

hope not : ) I observed these across three computers on different versions of macOS.

[gwbas1c]

I've been using MacOS for 20 years and I haven't encountered it. I rarely reboot.

Do you have some unusual hardware that requires a driver, or otherwise install something that requires a driver?

[ffitch]

No extra hardware, stock macbooks and an imac. No fancy apps either, RayCast is probably the only one that overrides default system behavior. It used to be better, a few years ago macOS would run stable for months, but even then I had to resort to ‘killall Dock’ for occasional glitches.