i’m a senior in college and for the past 3 years i’ve used a 2020 13” inch macbook pro. it was amazing and did everything i needed for university and then some. last year i spilled some water on it and it stopped working completely it made more financial sense to get a new computer than to pay the price they wanted to fix it. so it’s bricked essentially. i got a m2 macbook air as a replacement after hearing such good things about it. it is genuinely the worst machine i’ve ever used and it makes it near imposssible to do do work. nothing loads from webpages to programs and i can’t deal with it anymore. my course load requires using adobe suite and i can’t do that on here reliably. i’m at a crossroad because i spent $1700 on the computer and apple care for 3 years. i’m planning on selling the m2 air and fixing the pro but i’m really stuck and would love some advice. or does it make sense to invest in an m3 a pro as a method of future proofing. any advice would be greatly appreciated

  • justUseAnSvm@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    It’s really hard to say without being able to ssh into your machine and run some commands on the terminal while you are using adobe suite. One super easy to use tool (that’s worth paying for) is iStat, which is a menu bar that gives you information on CPU/RAM/Disk usage in the menu bar. That will give you a good idea what the bottle neck even is.

    It’s definitely possible that there is a hardware fault here, like one, or multiple of the CPU cores aren’t being able to be used, the L1/L2 cache is messed up, there’s a fault on your bus connecting the RAM. All of that would explain your reported issues, which is a systematic slowness, independent of load, which happens on all the software you try to run. Alternatively, there could be some program you are running (or virus) which is just eating system resources, so do a restart and check activity monitor (or use iStat) and see what’s going on.

    The easiest path to a fix here: go to the Apple Store and have them take a look. Otherwise, you’ll have to figure out how to run these diagnostics yourself. Good luck.