Although we think a lot about a photo's subject and its sharpness, what's happening elsewhere in the photo is critical to its success.

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Get more information about background processes from Activity Monitor, the command tool sfltool performing a BTM dump, attributions.plist, and the log.

From a simple linear Basic program, or a command tool like tar, to working with macOS to get threads allocated to the most appropriate cores and run at the right frequency.

After logging in, macOS may check for system software updates, run an initial Time Machine backup, and run XProtect Remediator scans. This is how those happen.

Spotlight indexes on-the-fly so new and changed files are quickly searchable, but periodically needs to assimilate those into its more static indexes. That and Live Text extraction are run following startup.