| Yeah, I agree - I don't think ram is usually the problem. I used to have a 2016 dual core macbook pro with integrated graphics and 8gb of RAM or something. The machine was great when I got it, but 18 months ago it was limping along and I finally decided to get rid of it. And it wasn't any 3rd party apps that killed the machine. Every time the machine started up, iphotoanalysisd or some random spotlight service or something would be eating all my CPU. It was always a 1st party Apple app which was making it slow. And the graphics felt laggy. Just moving windows around felt bad a lot of the time, even when I didn't have anything open. Xcode would sometimes lag the machine so much that it would drop keystrokes while I was typing. I had RAM to spare - it was a CPU problem. In the process of wiping the machine, I booted into Recovery mode and it booted the 2016 recovery image of macos. Holy smokes - the graphics were all wicked fast again! I spent a couple minutes just moving windows around the screen in recovery mode marvelling at how fast it felt. I wonder if reverting to an old version of macos would have fixed my problems. As far as I can tell, this was all Apple's fault. They piled up macos with so much crap that their own computers couldn't cope with the weight. I also wonder if they broke the intel graphics drivers in some point release somewhere along the way, or they started relying on GPU features that Intel's driver only had software emulation for. Modern macos still has all that crap - the efficiency cores in my M1 laptop are constantly spinning up for some ridiculous Apple service or something. But at least now that still leaves me with 8 P-cores for my actual work. Its ridiculous. I bet linux would have worked great on that old laptop. I wish I tried it before turfing the machine. |