You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
The Messages app (which you send and receive iMessages with) becomes very slow and unresponsive after upgrading to Big Sur. Other apps seem to be performing fine. Do anyone else have this problem? Will it be fixed in a future release?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.0
I found this and it worked for me.
Sonia Huelsenbeck says
After trying all the suggested fixes, I contacted Apple. They had me do the following and it worked:
Sign out of Messages on the MacBook. We can do that by opening Messages, then going to the top left corner of the screen and click messages -> iMessages. We should be able to sign out from there .
Up next we’ll go on the iPhone to Settings -> Messages, turn off iMessage, restart the iPhone, then turn iMessage back on.
Go back on the MacBook and get signed back into the Messages app.
Go on the iPhone to Settings -> Messages -> Text Message Forwarding. We should be able to flip a switch for the Mac to allow us to send SMS and MMS messages from the MacBook, and hopefully sort out the last of it.
Enter the code that pops up on your screen.
If you're having issues with laggy typing check the font the app is using. I apparently had a different font set in Messages that was no longer found and it was filling up the console with errors about not being able to find it or the size.
I went into Messages preferences and changed the "Text Size" at the bottom to "Default" and restarted Messages. No more errors and typing was back to normal! It bugged the **** out of me for months!
I jiggered around with the size a couple of weeks ago and things seemed to get better for awhile. I am now back to a sloooow response time as if it is hung in a spell checker or something. I think there is some kind of bug in Message.
Sign OUT of all devices. Reboot all devices. Sign back on with your iPhone, and AFTER you are signed back on, THEN sign on with each other device, ONE AT A TIME. You should be good to go after that. Consider your iPhone as the MASTER device for Messages, and the other devices as SLAVES. The slowness is coming from SYNC'ing.
It is something to do with SYNCing. The more devices you have to Sync, the worse it is. Sometimes one device will fail to sync at all. I think it is similar to the phrase, "Get Your Ducks In A Row," where the server tries to make sure that all the devices are updated to the same hierarchy. I hope Apple fixes it. I started seeing this problem when I went to Big Sur. Before that, everything seemed to work okay. Since I signed out on all devices, then back on with just the iPhone, before attempting to sync my iPad and iMac, I haven't had the problem. It sure drove me crazy at first though! Glad this worked for you.
73, de KØUNX, Jim, in Jefferson County Colorado
....we should be able to flip a switch for the Mac to allow us to send SMS and MMS messages from the MacBook.........
No such setting exists on the iPhone! Using IOS 14.2 and Big Sur 11.2 on an M1 mini
So issue persists for me!
OK I had to do 1 more step.... after all of the above, I had to turn off the iPhone one more time and when it was turned back on, the switch to enable text messages suddenly appeared in the IOS Setup app under messages...
all good now
Fiddling with text size seemed to bring some immediate relief. Whether or not it stays is another question. So far, other fixes haven't worked or were only temporary.
This problem is so bad I've considered downgrading to Catalina. Really frustrating.
This gave me some relief - It's now pulling up names more quickly when I add a name to the To: field in a new message, and when I click on a particular conversation, it does load faster, but scrolling is still painfully awkward and catchy/laggy. I also tried the cursor trick (wth?!) and it didn't help at all, maybe because my cursor was already at the smallest size. Thank you for posting this! Even this partial fix will help a lot.
I hope you're on this thread, Apple folks! It took me quite a bit of time to go through this process with my home iMac, work Mac, and iPad. 😑 Please get us a bug fix! Texting is an important part of my work communication, and for many others, I'm sure.
The only fix that works for me, and that seems to be temporary, is the one stated earlier to log out of all Message apps on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone, then log back in first with the iPhone and then with the iPad and iPhone afterward. That makes the lag go away for a week or two and then the sync issue slowly seems to rear its ugly head and I have to repeat the procedure. Clearly a software bug. Apple??
This how-to-solve article you reference is nothing but a potpourri of possible fixes that are discussed in this thread. Apple needs to come up with a definitive fix in the form of a software patch. This collection of fixes don’t pinpoint the problem and are all just temporary work-arounds.
I’m having this issue and have the following installed:
I have these installed in my machine:
Where do you find these settings? I don't have an option for a size:
Looks like, somehow, rebooting into safe mode and rebooting again solved my problem. Not sure what caused the problem, though.
Did this actually fix the problem? Or was it a temporary fix?
Message app slow and lags on Big Sur
