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Apple Mail completely breaks when you have 100.000+ mails in an IMAP account. Even on MacOS it‘s unusable (search, index) while Thundebird works flawlessly.

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The Finder on MacOS breaks when it has to deal with more than about 10,000 of anything. The MacOS Finder is chock full of O[n] and perhaps even O[n^2] algorithms that have been there, unfixed, since System 7. Back in 1996, a user with more than 100 files in a folder was unusual, so those algorithms worked fine. Nowadays not so much.

Proof: Copy 10k files from one hard drive to another with the Finder (not the same drive; you have to prevent COW). Now do the same thing with e.g. cp or rsync on the command line.

I also noticed a very slow refresh in Finder since like 5 years ago. Apple clearly needs to fix those issues, maybe using some LLM if they can‘t do it by hand anymore.

I’ve seen this too. Finder is useless when copying a large amount of files -- especially small ones.

Used to work at the Apple store and it was incredible how a handful of customers dropped thousands of files onto the desktop which in turn brought Finder to its knees.

Probably generating thumbnails or indexing is my unscientific guess

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