I purchased this MacBook brand new from Apple’s website within a couple of months of it just coming out (16" MacBook Pro with TouchBar). It’s a fairly upgraded machine and expected it would work great for at least 5 years. It worked great the first couple of years I had it, but for the last year, it’s been extremely slow and sluggish. I don’t do any processor-intensive tasks like video or photo editing. I mainly use it for browsing the web and creating basic Excel spreadsheets. It freezes up all the time when visiting websites or it will take 30+ seconds to load webpages. I have a very reliable ISP with over 100 Mbps upload & download speeds that works great on my girlfriend’s base model MacBook Air with an M1 chip or my iPhone 15 Pro Max. When I try to drag down a simple formula down 25 rows of data in Excel it’ll crash the app and lose anything that wasn’t previously saved. The fan will kick on high and run constantly with no apps other than Safari and Reminders open on my computer and get extremely hot to the point it’ll start to burn my bare legs. I get about 2.5 hours of use of it while having an average of 3-4 apps open at a time (Safari, Mail, Reminders, Calendar, etc) when the battery isn’t connected to power. I’ve scanned my Mac for viruses using Malwarebytes and it never detects any threats/viruses. For a four-year-old machine that was pretty advanced when I bought it, I am so disappointed in its performance. Does anyone else with M1 Macs have issues like these? I’m starting to wonder if me having an Intel processor Mac in 2023 is the main cause of this and wondering if I should trade it in for a more base model MacBook Air with Apple silicon where I’d only have to shell out a couple of hundred dollars. Does anyone else have this kind of issue with their MacBooks?
Apple would give me a $645 trade-in credit for my current computer (I’m sure I could get a little more money elsewhere). I’m also worried my 2019 MacBook will quit receiving macOS updates in the next couple of years which is another reason I’m thinking of an upgrade, what are your thoughts?
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Have the same laptop. I concur with your experience. macOS is just a shitty operating system.
A laptop like this shouldn’t be running slow. As someone else already suggested, check your Activity Monitor to see what’s going on there, if anything.
Take the trade in while it’s still that high and get anything with an Apple silicon M series processor.
It’s a four year old piece of tech. MacOS has advanced to take advantage of more efficient hardware in the Apple Silicon chips and unified memory and storage.
I’m typing this on a 7+ year Mac (2015 MBP Retina) running Monterey 12.7 and while this got a new battery last year, I have enough apps open (Edge, Excel, a few SSH sessions, PDF reader, Calendar) and the battery has about 3hours/50% left. At about 50% brightness. OP’s machine has an issue.
The Intel Macs simply are not efficient on MacOS Sonoma.
Try resetting it and go back to Ventura. I see a lot of complaints on here about Sonoma.
Sonoma is awful. Made my MacBook Air incredibly slow.
Sonoma.
That’s the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, right?
I have one. I definitely wouldn’t call it slow, but it’s certainly not as fast as newer machines.
The fans definitely should not run frequently unless the internal airways are clogged with dust. When is the last time you took off the bottom cover and cleared dust from the airways?
Have you replaced the thermal grease yet? It’s about time to do that as well, since old thermal grease won’t move heat away from the internal components as well as it did when it was new.
How sure are you that software running on the device isn’t hogging system resources? Have you looked carefully at Activity Monitor to see which processes are utilizing the most CPU and RAM? How full is the internal startup volume?
the intel machines have godawful heat management. i’d try to get an m1 with that trade in tbh
With basic tasks, heat absolutely should not be an issue even on Intel MacBooks.
Maybe reinstall the OS? I have a MacBook from 2017 and it still works flawlessly (though I had battery replaced few years ago)
Check if you have any kernel extensions installed. I had the same model and the Cisco kernel extension was making the OS supper sluggish. Disabling SIP solved the issue. It’s worth trying even if you don’t have any extensions installed.
Disable it and see if it makes any difference
I sold my fully loaded MBP 16 (2019) for the base model MBA M1 in November 2020.
It’s that much of a leap forward from the previous-generation Intel machines that in 2023, I can’t recommend anyone consider an Intel-based Mac for anything unless you’re getting it for really cheap and don’t stress it. A colleague of mine with the same machine ended up installing Windows on it and uses it to play games.
So the trade offer that you are getting is very good. People are selling these used on eBay and marketplace for a similar price, and that can be a hassle to deal with compared to the trade-in program at Apple.
Your system should be running better tho, I would factory reset and don’t even restore from a backup (there may be some program that is causing issues). Also very importantly, it could be overheating. I would suggest removing the backplate and checking the fans for dust, etc.
Virus
Get yourself an M series macbook instead.
I have seen incredible performance improvements from simply wiping and reinstalling the OS, when no other reason for slowness can be found. Sometimes it’s easier than tracking down some obscure cause.