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?
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?