My brand new computer is really slow

It’s almost certainly slow because it comes with a slow base 5400 RPM hard drive and 8 ram. APFS is what MacOS Catalina uses and it was actually meant for SSDs so that’s why it’s so slow, return it if it’s in the two week window and get a new one with an ssd or at least a fusion drive for sure

We see a lot of complaints on the base model, I even wonder how Apple could think of marketing this.

Many return it & get a model with better GPU, More RAM, & an SSD, others add an external SSD drive &boot from that, speeding things up considerably, but if you migrated any stuff from an older setup we may find other causes...

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

https://www.etrecheck.com/

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck. In a Reply before you click post, look for this to add longer texts...

I'd return it...

Avoid...

i3 CPU or i5 2 core CPU.

5400rpm drive, SSD needed with new 64 bit OS

8GB of RAM doesn't cut it these days, even the 16GB isn't really enough but will suffice with an SSD to take up the slack.

Intel sells several different CPUs, from slowest to fastest... i3, i5, i7, i9, & Xeon. They can have a different number of cores, or additional processing units.

Shall I continue or am I losing you?