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rotuts · Dec 10, 2011, 10:23 AM

at times i get the Beachball when my mac 'thinks' about something for a few seconds and at others 'The Watch'

what the difference in the process involved?

many thanks

Spheric Harlot · Dec 10, 2011, 11:06 AM

AFAIK, the watch was obsoleted ten years ago.

It shows up when an application has the cursor in its code, and the application programmers have coded for it to be shown while the app is thinking.

The beach ball is a system cursor and will be displayed when an application is unable to respond.
I'm pretty sure it can be called in the same situation as above, as well.

TETENAL · Dec 10, 2011, 08:04 PM

The beach ball is shown by the system, when an application does not respond to the system any more.

A watch cursor is shown by an application when it decides not to respond to the user any more.

Big Mac · Dec 10, 2011, 11:58 PM

They're both forms of wait cursors, but it's odd to see the watch cursor because it is a literal anachronism. I don't get how certain apps (Safari being among them at least in previous versions) inherited the watch cursor. It's not like Safari had a history on the classic Mac OS and got ported over to Mac OS X. Anyone know if XCode specifically provides for the watch cursor? And do apps ever throw up the beach ball purposely, or is it always and everywhere a system response to an app that has failed to respond for a period of time?

Eriamjh · Dec 11, 2011, 08:44 AM

I thought the beach ball indicated OSX was paging out to virtual memory (HDD) and the watch was like a "busy" icon (like the hour glass that flips over in windows).

Thorzdad · Dec 11, 2011, 08:51 AM

I see the watch sometimes when Adobe apps take a time-out to think things over. That's about it.

Spheric Harlot · Dec 11, 2011, 10:03 AM

Originally Posted by Eriamjh

I thought the beach ball indicated OSX was paging out to virtual memory (HDD) and the watch was like a "busy" icon (like the hour glass that flips over in windows).

Nope. The beach ball means an app is unresponsive, regardless of reason.

It's there when an application locks up, too.

The watch should no longer show up anywhere—theoretically.

Eden Aurora · Dec 11, 2011, 10:16 AM

sometimes when i get the beach ball, i can't even force quit out of the program. the whole computer is locked up. and i have to hard reboot the computer. i thought that wasn't suppose to happen with protected memory in OSX

Spheric Harlot · Dec 11, 2011, 10:21 AM

If the kernel locks up due to a crappy device driver, there's not much you can do.

A regular application cannot lock up the entire computer, true.

Big Mac · Dec 11, 2011, 03:56 PM

Originally Posted by Eden Aurora

sometimes when i get the beach ball, i can't even force quit out of the program. the whole computer is locked up. and i have to hard reboot the computer. i thought that wasn't suppose to happen with protected memory in OSX

That should be a very rare occurrence. If it happens to you with any frequency it indicates a hardware issue based on my experience, i.e. a problematic hard drive.

P · Dec 12, 2011, 04:45 AM

It doesn't HAVE to be the kernel. There are daemons in the OS that many things rely on, and if one of them locks up, you can beachball the entire OS without the kernel actually being locked up. One example of this was lookupd in 10.4, which cayse this for me a lot before I figured it out and jury-rigged a fix.