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Comment by ps | Hacker News Reader

I own MB Pro 16 (i9, 64GB RAM) and M1 Mac Mini (16GB) and I am still perplexed why do so many people ignore or not mention the sluggishness of the macOS on M1.

Switching apps is often plagued with at least noticable up to utterly annoying lag. Starting even optimized apps sometimes feels surprisingly slow. If the CPU is even under the light load (20 % reported by Activity monitor), these issues happen more frequently and overall responsivness gets much worse. It is not due to the low memory which I try to spare on Mini.

Yeah, Safari is fast, even faster than on the iPad Pro. But I am developer, often use multiple browsers, many docker containers, might spin up IDE and I am certainly not the one who they made it for.

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On my MPB M1 everything feels exquisitely responsive with the exception of the first time that apps that need to be translated by Rosetta. So it appears something might be off on your install.

That seems strange to me -- are you sure there's nothing wrong with your machine?

For reference, I just opened every application that's installed on my M1 MBP (16GB) and was able to switch between them with basically no lag.

I am a developer too, but I haven’t noticed any of these issues on my 16GB M1 MacBook Pro. macOS has been nothing short of zippy.

I wonder why you believe that everyone’s ignoring the issues you experience? Could it be some local phenomenon, instead?

My M1 Mac Mini destroys my 2019 16” Macbook Pro (i7). both machines have a 16 GB memory load out and 500 GB of SSD. I haven’t seen any of the performance issues you’re talking about. I do Python and Angular development.

From all the reviews and comments I've seen nobody else with an M1 is seeing that kind of sluggishness. Are you maxing out memory?

Are you sure there isn't something wrong with your setup? Switching apps is near instant on my 8GB MBA M1, app startup is sometimes a bit laggy, but overall responsiveness is much better than on my 16GM MBP 2019.

> I am still perplexed why do so many people ignore or not mention the sluggishness of the macOS on M1.

Conspiracy? Or...something up with your setup.

You are swapping.

Did you perform a system migration or a fresh install?

If you have an external SSD, you could potentially try a fresh install on it and see if the problem persists, then try to drill down to the offending driver/application.

I for one, have had no issues, but that's not to say they don't exist. Could be a process that is blocking or anything.

The only sluggishness I noticed, and was unexpected, was generating a SSH key.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

This was considerably slower on the M1 Mac Mini than my 2017 iMac.

Interesting; possibly running under Rosetta? I could see crypto operations being very poorly emulated, and if it had to be translated first (if you only ran it once), that would obviously be even worse.

Never heard of that before, are you running any background apps?

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