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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Launching apps takes ages on M1 mini. Reminded me of the good Windows Phone times.

Strange. With the exception of electron apps (which are slow everywhere), I've found my M1 mini to be extremely responsive. Much moreso than my 16" mpb.

Cold start of Electron, MS office, Affinity (all ARM versions) takes me north of 15".

8GB M1 Mini, so maybe that makes the situation worse.

Affinity Photo starts in 15 seconds on my M1, which IMO is not okay. It's just as slow as on my Haswell Intel Mac. Everything else launches in a second or so. Spotify (Electron) draws a window in three seconds, but takes another four to display all content.

For comparison, I have a maxed out current gen 16" Intel MBP and Affinity takes 25 seconds to launch.

Not sure what's causing the difference but it launches in 4 seconds for me. I have the base model 16" MBP.

I have the 8GB M1 as my daily driver, the only apps that take a long time for me (but NOWHERE NEARE 15 seconds - maybe close to 5, but I'm not counting) are visual studio Mac (which is probably rosetta), Unity (which IS rosetta) and blender (also rosetta).

VS Code launches instantly on my i7-4770 under Linux with XFCE. Same under Windows.

So do Slack and Spotify...

That's an 8 year old CPU! If you're having issues, the problem lies elsewhere not with Electron.

I think half the people in this thread are posting what they want to see and don't reflect reality.

I don't know why this was downvoted. You see what you see. Maybe my experience with electron is tainted :D

I don't have any measurements, and I'm not really going to take any. It's just always felt slow. So I'll admit I should've perhaps been less prescriptive.

That's a bit disingenuous to compare blazingly fast M1 to Windows Phones. What are you launching?

It's been known M1 is super fast launching apps compared to Intel macbooks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKRDlkyILNY

There's tons of video comparisons on YouTube.

Ah, Windows Phones were very responsive.

They were and they weren't. UI was pretty responsive, but starting programs was often slow. In 8.1 and above, starting the home screen was sometimes slow. So many dots crossing the screen.

Are you sure they aren't being run through Rosetta? If I remember correctly, x86 apps run through a translation process on first launch which obviously takes time. An acceptable trade off given the alternative is to not have the app at all on Apple Silicon.

Launching apps is lighting fast on M1 mini, and much faster than on Intel that it's not even funny.

Perhaps you have in mind some specific problematic app?

Or you include Intel apps that are translated to ARM on the fly on their first launch?

Weird, are they Rosetta apps? I haven't seen that on my M1.

Can it be related to this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247

That was my first Mac, so maybe it is a MacOS issue not M1.

I just described my bad experience with M1 with Big Sur. Not sure who is to blame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com