[Naomarik]

Looks like forced obsolescence. My former daily driver a 2015 Macbook Pro has somehow become so slow it struggles with the most basic tasks, even after a fresh install. Nothing seems wrong with it other than it's slow to the point that browsing the web is a pain and development work has become impossible. Wasn't like that when I bought it.

[gambiting]

How? I'm still using a Late 2008 MacBook Pro with Catalina and it runs absolutely fine for browsing and programming, and your 2015 model is running slow?

Also, that sounds like a bug not forced obsolescence, apple just doesn't allow new MacOSes to be installed on hardware old enough unless you hack around it.

[corytheboyd]

Running a 2012 MacBook Pro, also still works just fine for development. The screen suffers burn-in very easily now but it’s not a big enough distraction to upgrade :P

[leptons]

Apple switched to ARM CPUs. Your 2008 MBP now has an expiration date, where it will not be capable of any more OS updates after a certain date. All Intel Macs will not be supported after a certain date. We don't know what date that is yet, but it is coming.

[gambiting]

It already didn't get any "official" updates for years now but there is a community porting latest versions of MacOS to it, that's how I'm running Catalina. Besides, even with the ARM chips coming, it doesn't look like Intel macs will disappear straight away, x86-compatible MacOS will be around for years and years, if no for any other reason than that currently sold Intel macs will still be getting updates. And besides, it's a 2008 machine - if I only get a couple more years out of it then that's still great.

[Bud]

No, it does not look like "forced obsolescence", and could we please stop with this silly narrative every single time there is any kind of Apple bug?

It gets nobody anywhere, it's contradicted by a 20-year period of generally very reliable and long-lasting hardware from Apple, and additionally, it's lazy and uninformative.

[hungryforcodes]

Remember when they took a year off to basically rewrite and optimize Mac OS after 10.5? And they produced a wonderful OS that I’m sure people still have very fond memories of. It didn’t have a lot of new features, compared to 10.5. Steve Jobs even said that publicly a number of times, during that year. He said — and I’m paraphrasing — “that we will work on PERFORMANCE.” All my Macs since 1998 have suffered slow downs on Mac OS updates after say 10.6. 10.6 was the pinnacle of performance.

Every upgrade since 10.10 has had a NOTICEABLE slow down on my MacBook Air 2013, and my 2012 Mac Mini, and more recently my MBP 2017 is showing signs of slow down and reduced battery life as well with each update. They can even be point updates, not major ones.

These happen man, and I can’t see the real benefits that I’ve gotten from say 10.10 -> 10.15 that would outvalue the degradation in performance I’ve seen. Ok you say, a MBA 2013 is ready for the pasture, but a maxed out (RAM, SSD) MBP that is 3 years old is really just entering midlife.

It’s not a random mistake.

[gpm]

The 20 year period in which Apple has paid out hundreds of millions in dollars in settlements for illegally forcing obsolence of old devices, e.g. this one [1] that was settled in March of this year and this fine from France [2] in February of this year?

History is not on Apple's side here.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/technology/apple-iphone-l...

[2] https://fortune.com/2020/02/07/apple-iphone-slowdown-update-...

[acdha]

You might want to actually read those links: the issue was battery lifetime where Apple made the devices slow down when the battery could no longer meet peak demand rather than crashing. Lithium ion batteries are always going to degrade so it’s only forced obsolescence if you think Apple is sitting on some game-changing battery technology which doesn’t degrade over time.

[Bud]

Indeed, what this case actually showed, to people who are paying attention rather than looking for bogus reasons to accuse Apple of things, is that Apple was more committed to keeping older devices running longer. Not less.

That's the opposite of "forced obsolescence". And it's not even a close call. The stupid, credulous media coverage of this issue was embarrassing.

[DonaldPShimoda]

It's so frustrating that people immediately jump for "forced/planned obsolescence" whenever something like this happens.

Forced obsolescence is the deliberate undermining of a device to ensure that it cannot be used in the future. That would be if Apple intentionally included code in Big Sur to cause older MacBooks to mysteriously brick.

There is a big difference between intentionally writing code like this versus not performing adequate Q&A to ensure that such bug doesn't exist, and only the former of these qualifies as planned obsolescence.

[robbyt]

It's probably spotlight reindexing. This has been a problem with every version of osx for the past 20 years. Let it run overnight, and it should be caught up.

[TheKnack]

Came here to say this. This happens on all of Apple's operating systems - Mac, iOS, etc.

It's also a good idea to clean install all major (annual) versions of Apple OS's. When you install one major version over another, the upgrade script has to try to convert the configurations for most system services to the format for the new OS version and the possible combinations of settings in those configurations is virtually unlimited. A lot of post-upgrade issues and sluggishness result from non-optimal conversion of those configurations, especially on iOS. If you back up everything and format the drive before installing the new OS, everything will work much better. Yes it takes extra time to do that, but you will save many multiples of that time over the next year because your machine will run faster and have fewer issues.

[diebeforei485]

I actually wouldn't recommend clean installing every single year (unless you're running betas). But for the person with the 2015 MacBook Pro, 5 years later is a good time to clean install.

[arvinsim]

Might as well go back to Windows or Linux if I have to reinstall with every major update.

What am I paying the Apple tax for?

[ysleepy]

I work on a 2015 13" and its completely fine. Only the mission control animations are sometimes 15fps on my 4k screen. Web browsing and dev work is good as ever.

Maybe check if the cooling is clogged or the cpu is force throttling because some temp sensor is not working. Run apple diagnostic for that.

MacOS has a bunch of bugs (for me) and they have terrible QA as it seems, but I don't see planned obsolescence here.

[bayindirh]

My Mid2014 MBP doesn't show these symptoms. So, forced obsolescence is unlikely. Apple obsoletes devices by not providing software updates to them.

However, I was able to buy new batteries from apple for my non-unibody mac even after its update cycle is ended.

I can still buy aftermarket batteries for it and it works well. I might install something else on it in the future but, it's far from useless and dead.

[anonymouse008]

Check your kernel_task in Activity Monitor... if it's hogging all the processing % it most likely means the processor is being throttled.

The throttling sometimes happens because of a bad temp sensor / connection. Sometimes it's the charging port as well

[bayindirh]

Or during long re-indexing sessions which happen after OS updates generally.

[jimmaswell]

I've had laptops that got slower over time that turned out to be full of dust inside. Easy fix with an air hose or anything to the same effect.

[ashtonkem]

One of the more annoying parts of our current age is how quickly everyone responds with a conspiracy whenever something goes wrong. They made a mistake, it's that simple.

[sleepybrett]

Apple is very clear when they decide a certain machine or generation of machines will not be eligible for an os upgrade.

More likely as someone in the thread pointed out, this is probably a bug related to some kind of defect or damage in the system's io board. Perhaps a certain revision of said board is a problem. Some suggest that something the upgrade does 'damages the board' .. perhaps through some kind of firmware update, but that story isn't so clear yet.

[leptons]

>Apple is very clear when they decide a certain machine or generation of machines will not be eligible for an os upgrade.

Maybe they could make that clear for anyone buying an Intel based mac since we all know they are switching over to ARM CPUs. They won't though, they will still be selling Intel Macs for some time, knowing that they won't be supporting those macs through the useful lifetime of the hardware.

[ehvatum]

Replacing the dried out thermal paste and pads interfacing the main board chips with their heat sinks cured this issue on my ancient core2 black macbook, which remains a perfectly good gentoo laptop. The latest Intel chips don’t seem to be much better. It’s interesting.

[joshontheweb]

Could be dust buildup inside causing overheating and cpu throttling

[JohnTHaller]

Have you done a full internal cleaning and reapplying the thermal paste?