Originally Posted By: ryck
I’ve always thought of it as a fast running clock - sort of a: “While you wait, we’re going as fast as we can.”

It may have disappeared from Apple, but it’s popped up elsewhere. Netflix uses the same indicator while a movie is loading ….so I wonder if it’s some sort of copyright issue.

I forgot to mention that the running clock *does* appear on my 2010 MacBook Pro running High Sierra. In another forum I posted in, another user running High Sierra also reported that his MacBook Pro shows the spinner at shutdown and restart.

Something else must be going on here. The next time I need to restart, I'm going to switch to the other account on my iMac I use for troubleshooting purposes and see if it appears properly there. I keep it as clean as possible and install as little as possible on it in the way of extras. I should have tried that first before asking, but I didn't think about it.