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by wasyl 816 days ago
I'd guess not the latter — anecdotally, my intel mac has been increasingly sluggish after each macos upgrade, even after a clean install. I finally decided to revert to the oldest macos version possible (and then update by just one major version since unfortunately some apps I need don't support Catalina anymore) and the difference is night and day — my memory was right and my laptop _was_ faster before. And it's not hardware getting old or battery problems, it's the OS.

So I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA, but I don't believe they're actually intentionally supported
2 comments
microtonal 816 days ago
I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA,

More likely neither. Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.

(My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.)

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wasyl 816 days ago
> Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.

So every major OS update is larger and more complex, so it's to be expected that after ~4 of those my machine lags when doing literally everything? It's not that I'm running tons of background apps, it's a powerful machine lagging on a clean install of a recent macOS version when doing basic operations like opening a webpage.

> My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.

I suppose it's Apple Silicon? Because that would still be in line with Intel-based macs becoming less performant over time

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switch007 816 days ago
My intel MacBook lags in such a predictable and constant way, as if a process is running constantly at 99% CPU. Makes me a bit suspicious

How much have they /really/ added to the OS (which is enabled on my hardware) and consuming extra resources?

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wasyl 816 days ago
A while ago I went into a rabbit hole looking for something to support my hunch (which I now confirmed by installing old macos) and found some discussions about graphics/OpenGL APIs being deprecated and removed over time. I have a very uneducated guess that new-macos-on-old-hardware runs some translation for all graphics operations/APIs, which causes perceptible lag when doing _anything_, because everything draws on the screen. It does feel as if the OS is constantly struggling with some background tasks
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