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?
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.