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Comment by zzt123 | Hacker News Reader

I have a gripe with every Macbook Pro I've owned, and I've owned 4 of them over the last 10 years.

They all lag when I type. I hit a key, and it takes a while before it shows up on screen. The effect is at its worst in Safari, but it shows up most everywhere else as well.

Sometimes, I'll type a few letters or even words before they start showing up. Doesn't matter if I wipe the machine and reinstall, and Apple has never been able to resolve it for any of their machines I've owned.

I do type faster than average, but I don't think it is humanly possible to type fast enough to make a proper computer lag. This has never been an issue on any of my concurrently owned Windows/Linux machines. Only on Mac, and on every single Mac.

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Hmmm.. FWIW, I type at like 130wpm (I have won typing competitions), and have never experienced frequent text-input latency on my Macs (I've used Macs since the mid-80's). Only intermittent due to obvious things like CPU-intensive operations in progress.

Did you see it happening on really "simple" applications like Terminal? What's crazy to me is how you saw it happening on a fresh OS install... had you installed any other software? Or any kind of customization to settings, locale, stuff like that? Curious how that could be happening!

Fresh is "fresh but with IntelliJ and a large project open", but without all the background NGINX etc installed.

Once one app starts lagging, they all lag. Terminal, TextEdit, Safari, Notes, IntelliJ, everything.

I'm well north of 130wpm, but I don't think that matters for the issues that my Macs have had to deal with, as I used to be well below 130wpm and still experienced such issues.

How did you increase your typing speed so much? I’m sitting at around 70ish wpm and would like to increase it

Lots of slowly accumulated, deliberate practice here and there over many years. monkeytype.com is probably the best site for typing right now. And I just destroyed so many of bits of anonymity haha.

For me, chatting online for hours on end since ~1997. My impatience to get a message out naturally resulted in typing faster.. I also played piano since childhood which I'm sure helped.

I've got the same issue, I'm a relatively slow typer (90WPM) but every now and then the Mac just becomes so slow and typing everywhere is lagged. It usually happens when I'm working on the frontend of our app which has a javascript 3D engine in it, and the editor is visual studio code, so I was just assuming it was some weird Blink engine problem.

IntelliJ: Thats your problem.

Everytime i tried to run their IDE's on mac os i gave up because the abysmal typing/scroll performance.

I think textmate broke my brain back in the day, can't stand any editor that can't run at 60fps. (unless it's vim/nano on ssh)

Hmmm.. I run IntellJ IDEA on my 2013 MBP and I don't experience system-wide text-entry latency. Though, to be fair my version of IDEA is pretty old (2016.2)

We have hundreds of engineers at work who all use the same apps on latest MacBook Pros.

There have been zero reports of widespread lagging which clearly indicates that there is some problem with your setup. IntelliJ is the likely candidate especially if you are doing Scala or Kotlin development.

I have a strange lag problem too.

My CapsLock key (mapped to Esc because I am a Doom Emacs User) gets really slow over days. Like in ~4 seconds to register. A reboot fixed the delay. But it degrades again.

Happened twice. Thankfully, after the last reboot, it seems to be holding.

Last year MBP running Big Sur.

Coincidentally, my lag issues got a lot worse since upgrading to Big Sur. As did my thermal throttling.

I map it the same way to caps lock and experience exactly the same you describe. I noticed after the last patch a few weeks ago it went away for now. Been driving me nuts until.

Have you applied the 11.5.2 update? The Caps Lock slowness/beach ball issue seems to be related to the high WindowServer CPU issue and has gone away for me since I applied 11.5.2.

Huh. Me too. It's like it switches between two modes: typing, or emacs-keys-movement. And sometimes gets so bad it takes almost a second between them.

Resetting my bluetooth module and factory resetting all connected bluetooth peripherals helps usually. But it's a pain.

I was running an MBP for work and running Doom Emacs got me the exact same issue, that would spread to everything. Luckily I was up for a new machine before things got to bad and on the new Dell Percision I haven't had any issues (after I installed Ubuntu on it)

For me it's the '0' key on my numpad on an external keyboard. Takes up to 500ms to be scanned. All other keys have input lag, but are scanned instantly. Keyboard works flawless on Linux. Really weird. Wondering if the '0'key is somehow scanned in software on Mac.

This exact issue shows up when I type in Terminal, and it makes me annoyed every time.

I used to have this on my work computer, and through some debugging tools that are not available publically or on macOS, I was able to track it down to my shell spawning a git process very frequently; until you mentioned this I suspected that this was the case on my MBP as well.

Could it be that this is just generally true? I don't remember this on my 2014 MBP, just my new 2019 16" MBP. Supposedly the latter is a more powerful machine.

It's gotten so bad that I frequently consider wiping my computer and seeing whether it'll be fixed with a new environment.

Wow. Full time Mac user with a very, very high typing speed (consistently tested at 90+ WPM), and I have never had a keyboard lag issue with a Mac. Sure, I've had piggy apps -- usually web apps -- create lags, but that's happened on lots of systems, not just Macs.

If my Macs couldn't keep up with my typing, I'd have kicked them to the curb a LONG LONG LONG time ago.

I am quite a bit above 90 wpm. Almost exactly double for sustained (1 min+), and more than that for burst.

My theory is that the Intel macs generate too much heat for the chassis to handle (I'm currently on a 16" 2019), especially when being used by IntelliJ in projects with many files, having additional dev stuff running in the background, and with an external monitor connected.

Additionally, I perceive more lag on the Mac itself than on the external monitor, so I think there is a component that is due to the slow speed of the Macbook Pro display.

My theory is that you generate too much heat by typing that fast :)

No, seriously, what’s the secret?

Lots and lots of practice during moments of downtime. Those small moments add up over the years.

Back when I got my first Mac (2012) I was plateaued at 80-100 wpm. From there, it was an accumulation of intentional practice for fun and enjoyment.

WPM in the 90s is above average, but not "very, very high"! But I can see that you are a really really really big fan of adverbs...!

Wow, it's pretty interesting that you took the time to challenge the statement without actually verifying that you are correct.

You are, of course, wrong. Cursory googling will show average typing speed to be about half the figure I noted. I've never worked with anyone who typed as quickly as I can, and I've been working quite a while.

But hey, at least you got to drop a dig in about adverbs, so you've got that going for you.

I don't see any adverbs in the post being referred to, making it even more pointless. "Speed" is a noun, not a verb. "Time" is also a noun, so in both cases we're looking at adjectives.

> You are, of course, wrong.

I'm rolling

I recommend expanding your web search just a little farther... 90 WPM is not considered "very, very high"!

90 WPM is ok, certainly above average. But please don't take it personally, I was just scrolling through the comments and saw what I thought was a typo, and if not, thought I'd share my perspective. 120WPM can be considered "fast".

If 90 WPM is "very, very fast" then what about those at 120 or 150?

Keep digging!

I don’t understand - why the childish behaviour and wilful ignorance? If the facts don’t matter to you, that’s fine. All the best.

Doesn’t always happen to me but under load yes. Also: letters appearing out of the order I typed them.

The only thing that lags from time to time on my M1 is opening a Safari tab. Recently did a clean install to get rid of some 10 year Time Machine backup cruft I accrued and it's gone. I've owned 3 in the past 10 years and none of them lag when pressing a key not even my wife's white MacBook with a HD.

Safari became unusable to me I might be a tab hoarder but I can’t be the only one. Sometimes it takes a minute to come to foreground again.

Switch to firefox, there are extensions to put tabs in the background so it feels lightweight whether you have 1 tab or 1001. All of apples reported efficiencies with safari just wash away when you compare it to the performance of firefox with tab suspension and ublock origin considering the modern web.

I just wish there was some interoperability with the tab syncing and password management features in Safari. I know that isn’t on Mozilla, but having to migrate the massive iCloud database of all my passwords and give up tab syncing to my phone makes switching to Firefox a hard sell.

What I did was switch to firefox on my phone as well. No issues with passwords in my experiences really.

Just put you tabs into bookmark folders for later use. For dev work I understand how one could need a lot of tabs but I just bookmark them into a folder.

I've noticed the same thing on my 2019 16". In my case, at least, it seems to happen only when the integrated GPU is in use. If I force the discrete GPU to be used, it doesn't happen. I've been able to reproduce this on fresh installs with no third party apps installed or running.

It's incredibly frustrating, and just one more thing to add to the pile of annoyances that I have with Apple products lately.

I've noticed this too: at first on my friend's hackintosh, which I just chalked up to a bad kext or something. I was pretty surprised to find that the used MBP I bought also exhibited the behavior. Touch-typing on it feels like I'm fat fingering a Nokia keypad, with how frequently I need to delete and try again.

If you type on a Mac on display in an Apple Store, does it behave the same way?

The M1 Macs I tried at the store are the first ones where I'm not sure if there is a lag or not. I'm planning on upgrading once the M-series Macs have at least 32gb of ram, so I'll see at that point.

Same problem and on Safari as well.

But I do think the problem is fairly recent as in the last 4- 5 years after certain macOS update.

It works when you have little to no CPU usage, but even at 20-40% CPU typing speed lag start to show.

I wonder if it could be the hardware acceleration? Hardware acceleration can be weird at times and cause strange behaviors. They are not always consistent across all computers. I couldn't find the information if there is a way to disable the hardware acceleration in Safari.

FWIW, I've had poorly behaved USB devices cause lags, spinning beachballs, zombie hangs.

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