MacBook Air M1 chip SO slow?

I have been using 8g m1 air for 1 month and very happy with it. I also use photoshop without any problem. Remember to use the latest photoshop and if it's still slow try the beta version which is designed for apple silicon

I do not think it is a ram issue. I know 8 GB is mediocre but since I already have a desktop that perform well with my photoshop I did not bother even planning to upgrade my Macbook especially since it is for school and just for Blender/Photoshop. The requirements for Adobe Photoshop is 8GB so it should not crash frequent. I am starting to believe it is the M1 Chip since I heard some applications do not support the new M1 chipset. I think it goes slow when you use the regular macintosh intel version instead. I heard they have to convert it in order to make it able to work with the M1 version, so maybe that is the main reason why it is slow. Simply because Adobe Photoshop does not have the Apple Chip version application yet. I currently do not heavily rely on adobe so I just use Gimp, the only thing slow with it is just scrolling while doing your work. I use the side and bottom bar instead of scrolling which is a bit slower and annoying but it gets the job done. It is much faster than Adobe on this Mac. Other than that, most applications I am getting have the M1 support, I personally like the Mac a lot for my needs but I am a bit impatient to fact that not all applications support it making it slow for example like Adobe. All I can say is just wait for it to be more accessible in a few months when more application make M1 Chip support.

Update- I’ve wiped and done a clean install of the latest OS, and now my M1 is running as I expected it to from the beginning. I think starting from

scratch rather than doing a data migration did the trick!

totally agreed, stuff compiled for M1 is quick, however stuff complied for intel is awful. After a series of complaints and proof in the apple store i managed to get a refund and got an intel based macbook which is much faster. given the majority of apps are still intel based, it is very misleading of apple to state performance figures being so high, when for any intel app they are software emulating via rossetta.

Until Adobe releases M1 native versions of their apps, that's pretty much what I would expect.

Most well written Intel apps will actually run faster on the M1 than they will on a genuine Intel CPU.

"Well written" is the key. Adobe's products are so bloated, it's not at all surprising that they crawl on the M1.

Just to let you know fellows. My problem has been resolved. I can let you know how this will be resolved.

And I can tell you M1 is really really fast. Can say fastest machine available in retail for users at mass scale.

This is a change of architecture and I have read from.majority of software vendors that they are starting to role out arm architecture compiled versions.

And just google about how to find the best software version for M1. As far as dev tools are concerned your problems will be resolved fast. But at the same time I can tell you we are guinea pig who decided to buy this quite early. Its going to take time for vendors to role out a compatible version.

It appears that the M1 is speed is based on the app that is being used at the time so some will have issues and others not so much. Perhaps the slow apps will be updated to perform better on the M1 units over time.

If you got a base model with only 8 GB, I am willing to bet

the Adobe Cash Cow products are sucking up all your RAM.

Sounds like you may have a faulty unit. I got the M1 MBA (16GB RAM) and it really flies, including when using Adobe Lightroom (before and after the M1 update). I also understand there is a Photoshop Beta that is optimized. Anyhow, 3 minutes to wake up sounds very odd, mine just takes a second or two even when re-opening a ton of apps.

I have been also been trying to use the M1 for the past few days and it's even slower than the MacBook Air 2013 I had. It just keeps crashing. Initially I thought it was caused by the connector to the hard drive. Changed that. Later I assumed it was the hard drive because it was the SATA drive not the SSD.

Today I don't have anything connected. I am just running a browser, nothing else. It's still slow. I only added a few apps non of which aren't running. Even just waking it up from sleep took a whole 3 minutes.

Guess I got carried away with all the stupid hype on You Tube about this being super fast when it's super slow

Mine is the same. Sounds like it's a case of waiting for Adobe to catch up.

Interestingly I've just used After Effects on it for the first time, and that was fine... whereas I would have expected that to be slow. But the lag in Indesign is so frustrating... I can barely write a paragraph without it freezing.

Wow, that's interesting, as I'm experiencing the same thing, and I can't believe I don't see a better performance from my new 202 Macbook Air with 16GB Ram & M1. Has it made a difference to delete the migrated data?

The M1 chips are awful, I bought a new macbook air (MacBookAir10,1 8GB) from apple and they refuse to refund it after attending genius bar and expressing my concerns about how slow it is. Like for like my 8 year old macbook air is almost 5 times as fast when using the following applications, seems apple have made a huge mistake taking on their own chips, mis leading customers that they are super fast when in reality they are up to 5 times slower for my general usage.

• Chrome rendering charts with jupyter notebooks (x5 slower on M1)
• Java compilation with open jdk 8 and 11 (x2 slower on M1)
• Mysql operations (5x slower on M1)
• matlab (3x slower on M1)

Effectively my nice new shiny M1 macbook air is useless for my main usages, and feel totally rip off my apple and their arrogance that they will not refund my M1 as I should be be using an macbook air with such applications. For an organisation that claimed moving to their own silicon was to improve the end to end user experience, all they have managed to do it kill it dead.

Time to ditch apple and move fully to linux.

Anyone want to buy a 2 week old macbook air (MacBookAir10,1 8GB) ?

I got the 16GB M1 model and it is also significantly slower when using Adobe CC than my 8GB 2015 MBP.

The image goes blank even when I use the eraser.

All the youtube videos indicated that it was faster...