General M1 performance questions from a disgruntled early adopter

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General M1 performance questions from a disgruntled early adopter

Last month, I traded my late 2014 MacBook Air for the MacBook M1. When running Apple apps, the M1 appears to be as fast as the 2014 MacBook. When running third-party apps, the M1 appears to be markedly slower than the 2014 MacBook.

Examples: Steam runs extremely slowly, even when simply navigating menus. Most games run at 20 frames per second or fewer. Crusader Kings 2, which is not a demanding game at all, runs at 20-30 frames per second, and I must put it on the lowest graphical settings in order to achieve that performance. Several games encounter a fatal permissions error, for which there is apparently no workaround, and won't open at all. Adobe Acrobat scrolls Pdfs at 5-10 frames per second, making it difficult or impossible to navigate Pdfs quickly. Fruity Loops, a standard music-making program, processes audio very poorly, much worse than my 2014 MacBook. Websites load as fast as they did on the 2014 MacBook, but no faster, and several standard websites encounter strange failures to load.

I have no doubt that, by a certain measure of raw speed, the M1 is an improvement over prior models. But functionally, my M1 MacBook runs much, much more slowly than my 2014 MacBook when it is running anything besides Apple apps.

Is this a common experience that others are having? Is it a matter of apps not yet being optimized for the M1? Will this improve as developers optimize for the M1, or is this simply the punishment for being an early adopter?

Grateful for any feedback. If this is being discussed elsewhere, a link to that discussion will do.

MacBook

Posted on Dec 25, 2020 8:18 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 26, 2020 11:39 AM in response to FugueLife

FWIW, two apps I use, DxO PhotoLab 4, RAW image processor, and

Adobe Bridge that I use for photo management are the two Intel apps

that perform the 2-3 faster that I have mentioned.

Also, did you use Migration Assistant to move things from your 2014 Air?

It is very possible it brought along some incompatible stuff from it.

Perhaps you mat want to download Etrecheck from the MacApp Store,

run it and post the results. It gives a snapshot of your system without

revealing any personal info. A look at that could give us a clue as to

your issues. Quite often what may seem to be trivial ends up being

a major issue and you may not even be aware that it is there.

When posting the results, add it with the "Additional Text" button

you see in the menubar below these posting windows.

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Answer 2

Dec 25, 2020 10:54 AM in response to FugueLife

You must have a lot of background processes going on as I have found

my M1 MacBook Air to be 2-3 faster than my late 2013 27" iMac and that

is with Intel apps.

As far as web page loading, generally, they will only load as fast as

as your internet connection can feed data. And these days they are

feeding tons of data, especially with al the animated adds tryin to

get you to buy the latest and greatest.

Also, usually the one megakiller of performance are antivirus apps.

If you have any installed remove them as macOS has its own built

in protection.

Also, another big killer is adware that sometimes get bundled with apps

on some not so safe download sites (always download any app directly

from the vendor or the MacApp Store) or you are convinced into downloading

them by some other nefarious means (sites telling you to update Adobe Flash

and give you a link are notorious for such).

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Answer 3

FugueLife Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 26, 2020 10:52 AM in response to Josh Dare

Thanks for these replies!

I'm not running any anti-virus software, and as far as I know, I have no special amount of background processes. I am a very typical user; I use Steam for gaming and Pages for word processing and Safari for web browsing, and, occasionally, Fruity Loops for music making. That really is the extent of my installations, and none of those come with nefarious side effects that would explain this performance.

And yes, Josh, I know that this is a new chip architecture. I'm hoping that my bad experiences with Adobe, Steam, and Fruity Loops are simply a matter of those apps not yet being optimized for this structure. Unfortunately, some of the games I play are small enough that I doubt the developers have the bandwidth to port their game to this chip architecture. C'est la gaming, I suppose.

That said, I am annoyed to find that this computer performs worse than my old computer in any way, for any reason. I feel there is a disconnect between how the developers are developing this technology and what the consumer actually cares about. My software does not run well on this computer, and it is no consolation to me that the chipset is, by some measure that is not relevant to my needs, much faster than the old chipset. I feel Apple should have foreseen the effects this new chipset would have on third-party software more clearly than they did. Or perhaps they foresaw those effects but disregarded them. In either case, I feel this problem has a solution, and I look forward to a time when that solution sees daylight. Right now, this computer is inferior in many practical ways to my much older computer, and superior to that computer in theory only.

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Answer 4

Dec 25, 2020 3:51 PM in response to FugueLife

Anecdotally, it's not something I'm experiencing. Admittedly, I don't use too many third party apps (mainly exist in Safari, Trello and Toggl).

You're aware that the M1 chip is a new chip architecture tho, right? Third party apps will need to be optimized to work on the whole new set up. The existing apps would be for an Intel chipset, which operate distinctively. Have a read of this explainer.

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General M1 performance questions from a disgruntled early adopter

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