Monterey on iMac still slow and I did every trick

Question

Monterey on iMac still slow and I did every trick

I did absolutely everything recommended to speed up response time in Monterey 12.4 and it is still slow. Should I downgrade? I like the OS, but it is blindingly fast on my MacBook, agonizingly slow on the iMac.

iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2019), 3.1 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9, 64 GB RAM

MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020), 16 GB RAM

The laptop is running OS 12.3.1. I am afraid to upgrade to 12.4 because it's so much faster than the desktop. Supposedly the M1 chip is 50-70% faster than the Intel, but what I am seeing is more like 200% faster or more.

iMac 21.5″, macOS 12.4

Posted on May 31, 2022 10:40 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

steve626

Level 6

10,139 points

Jun 1, 2022 7:06 PM in response to Carol in Chicago

Carol in Chicago wrote:

It's not a SSD. It's a 4TB 5400RPM HDD. I'm going to take the computer to the Genius Bar tomorrow to see what replacing the drive will cost.

I replaced the 5400 rpm HDD in a 2016 iMac with an SSD. The SSD I chose is this one: Samsung - 870 EVO 1TB SATA 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive. It cost about $100. I used an Apple Authorized Service Provider (not the Apple Store) to do the drive replacement and it cost about $50 for the technician labor. With Monterey and APFS, the new SSD is about 20-50 times faster than the HDD, nothing else was changed (still has just 8 GB memory and does great). It's almost like a new computer.

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,920 points

Jun 1, 2022 1:04 AM in response to Carol in Chicago

If the iMac has a Fusion drive with the tiny SSD (~30GB), the slowness was purported to be fixed in 12.4. I don’t know how that worked for everyone. Is the Fusion drive still “fused?”

If you have the 256GB SSD, then I don’t know why it would be slow.

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