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Ask HN: Is your M1 getting sluggish?

7 points by kderbyma ↗ HN
I have recently been getting frustrated with my M1 mini (16GB RAM)

In the past month I have started to see the tell tale signs of slowing down and lack-lustre performance.

Things are progressively getting slower for all tasks. I am struggling to load some websites when I have a few programs running.

I have also noticed that when I first launch it is almost UNUSEABLE while it struggles to handle mouse input, keyboard input, audio delays, and frankly....this is one of the worst experiences I have had with a computer.

Windows SUCKS! But as a fan of Lenovo for the past 10 years and an ardent linux fan - I was expecting that this mac would compete....

---

Previously Macs don't slow down...so Its either the latest OS or its the M1 itself... but something is getting worse and worse.

Am I crazy? Or is this a lemon?

23 comments

[ 57.8 ms ] story [ 1922 ms ] thread
slater
"Previously Macs don't slow down" ... what magical Macs have you been previously using? /s

Also, check if your HDD is full?

kderbyma
I was using a 5 year old i5 mac mini 16GB - it was fine until Xcode 13.
worik
Me too. But a Macbook thingy, from 2015ish

It started overheating on the software update that gave me Xcode 13

newsbinator
My 2015 13" MacBook Pro became unusable due to thermal throttling. It regularly heats up from 60º cold boot to 100º seemingly at random. Is it VS Code? A bunch of open tabs? Running the Firebase emulator? I haven't been able to pin down why it gets so hot while doing little or why it sometimes doesn't get very hot while doing a lot.
Klonoar
Mine still runs beautifully after a year. I guess as a metric for usage:

- I keep Safari open 24/7 with probably ~40 tabs at a time.

- I build decent-sized Rust projects during my day work.

- Standard apps in use (IRC, TablePlus for SQL work, Telegram/Mail/etc)

- The only Electron app I use is Signal... which maybe contributes? i.e I'm avoiding a lot of runtime bloat.

16GB M1 MacBook Pro. I was going to buy a Max but I've heard concerns re: the smoothness of the screen and so want to avoid being a gen 1 tester.

kderbyma
Docker is a nightmare on mac. Maybe thats why. I have docker running for VMs
Klonoar
This would, unfortunately, not surprise me in the least.
kderbyma
I keep Safari open 24/7 with probably ~40 tabs at a time.

---- Safari? 40 Tabs? OMG....you and I are a different breed my friend.

Klonoar
Heh, 40 might be undercounting it. I prune it weekly though, it just functions as a delayed to-view list.
willcate
M1 Mini purchased Nov. 2020 -- still works great.
firecall
This is Hacker News...

So you'll need to do better than a collection of symptoms without any analysis to describe your experience!

At least take a look at Activity Monitor, or run HTOP.

Are your Kybrd, Mouse and Audio devices connected via BT by any chance?

Is your SSD full?

Have you got a bunch of synching service installed?

A malware crypto miner? ;-)

But overall, for me, no, none of M1 Macs are getting sluggish! :-)

kderbyma
No its a mac problem. Mac M1 has terrible support for a few things.

Audio - a bunch of problems - drivers not working, a nightmare trying to record, and need to purchase 3rd party software to use audio monitorying.... - Wifi & BT are both pretty shitty. The radio they use is poorly positioned or something and cannot seem to pick up signal well if tilted certain angles.

---

Because of the aboce....all my peripherals are wired...same issues.

this is after a fresh reboot---before I login.

Klonoar
Drivers not working on M1, if they're third party, are generally on the vendor - not Apple. Kexts do not run with Rosetta translation.
kderbyma
Im not talking about peripheral drivers (I mean recording audio from software that running on the operating system)
Klonoar
Exactly which driver are you talking about then...?

It would be useful to note it specifically, you might get a drive-by fix by one of the macOS wizards on this site.

uberman
check the health of your harddrive
luhego
Mine seems to be working fine. I usually have Slack, Discord, Chrome and Pycharm opened. However, when I try to play video games I can see the downgrade in performance. It starts to heat and becomes noisy. This combined with the lack of games on Mac is making me consider getting a windows laptop or trying Stadia.
jayShimada
I share your frustration daily. I decided to buy the new M1 Pro (16GB RAM) because my old 13' MacBook pro (2017) was unusable due to its sub-hour battery life and unbearable sluggishness. There was always this lag between typing and the text appearing in my editor, which was stressing me out a lot. At first, I was amazed at how fast and smooth my expensive upgrade was, but after starting to use Docker, things changed for the worse. I assume (and I may well be wrong) that something is going on when running Docker on M1 macs.

My recent switch to vim from WebStorm was in hopes of preserving as much RAM as I could (WebStorm typically used 2~3GB of RAM on my machine) to prevent the bursts of slugginess.

kderbyma
Yes, docker has been the driving issue - The virtualization has a long way to go imho before it can stand up fully and the ARM rosetta + Docker is like watching paint dry - its brutal.
shetill
if they aren't getting slower how are they going to make you buy their new ones?
DrWhax
time to buy a new one! :pPPpPPp
Nextgrid
Yes - I am actually contemplating a return to Linux.

I can't pinpoint exactly what's wrong, but things that used to feel instant now feel slower and I no longer believe it's just the web catching up (otherwise those websites would be completely unusable on x86). Just a couple JS-heavy pages open make the entire machine unusable (IntelliJ starts stuttering like crazy) and a video call is out of the question, despite me successfully using IntelliJ while on calls using a 12-inch Macbook with an entry-level x86 processor.

I'm not sure if it's a hardware problem (NAND wearing out due to a bug that just thrashes IO constantly?), software (I reinstalled the OS recently just in case) or something else. There's also so much shit running in the background (look in Activity Monitor) that it's hard to tell what's normal and what's not. I think of going back to Linux, at the very least it'll be a relatively simple system I can understand.