that's the danger in posting this sort of ancedote. there's always someone who's "never seen a beachball". It's not that I truly don't believe you, but I think you're in the minority. I see beach ball behaviour on pretty much every mac user in my coworking space daily.

Personally, I'm on my fourth mac over the last 8 years, various models, had both spinning disk and SSD, 4, 8 and 16gigs of ram. Wife has had various macs going back to ... 2002?

I can't recall a working day go by without pauses, hangs and beachballs. And... I've had the equivalent behaviour on Windows models and Linux machines going back to at least the late 90s. :(