Several issues after updating to Monterey

You've installed what many of the experienced users here consider akin to malware: CleanMyMac.

First, there is no reason to ever install or run any 3rd party "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus, VPN or security apps on your Mac.  This user tip describes what you need to know and do in order to protect your Mac: Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community.  

There are no known viruses, i.e. self propagating, for Macs.  There are, however, adware and malware which require the user to install although unwittingly most of the time thru sneaky links, etc.   

Anti Virus developers try to group all types as viruses into their ad campaigns of fear.  They do a poor job of the detecting and isolating the adware and malware.  Since there are no viruses these apps use up a lot of system resources searching for what is non-existent and adversely affect system and app performance.

There is one app, Malwarebytes, which was developed by a long time contributor to these forums and a highly respected member of the computer security community, that is designed solely to seek out adware and known malware and remove it.  The free version is more than adequate for most users.  

That being said uninstall CMM according to the developer's instructions. Then rerun Etrecheck to verify that you've removed all of its supporting files.

Additionally, you've purchased the slowest iMac that Apple offered at the time of purchase: 8 GB of RAM and a 5400 rpm hard drive. That is shown by the read and write speed of your Mac:

 Write speed: 61 MB/s

 Read speed: 65 MB/s

You can't upgrade the RAM but you can add an external SSD, clone your boot drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner, and boot and run from the EHD.

I have an external SSD on my 2017 iMac which I can boot from running beta system and get thsse types of read and write speeds:

which range at 6+ times faster for both read and write. If you decide to go this route I recommend you contact OWC (MacSales.com) Customer Support to see which on their many external SSDs would best suit your particular Mac and your budget.

Download and run Etrecheck.  Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

IMPORTANT:

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck in the first window that comes up so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Also click the About… vurron and read the info to further permit full disk access.

Copy the report

and use the Additional Text button to include the report in your reply.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can find the culprit that's causing the problem.

After a brief review of the EtreCheck report you provided, here are some of my observations/suggestions:

• Your Mac mini is hardware limited, both RAM (8 GB) & HDD (5400 RPM.) This may have been sufficient when it was running macOS High Sierra, but with Monterey it introduces a number of issues. One of them is that the system drive was reformatted with Apple's new APFS file system. This system was designed to work best with SSDs, not HDDs. Just letting you know.
• Kernel Extensions - /Applications/VMware Horizon Client.app: Running VMs may pose problematic with the limited RAM available for them to run in.
• User Launch Agents - [Loaded] com.macpaw.CleanMyMac4.Updater.plist (MacPaw Inc. - installed 2022-05-10): I suggest completely removing this app. CleanMyMac is known to cause more issues than resolve them.
• User Login Items -
  • Remove all CleanMyMac-related items.
  • [Running] Google Chrome (Google LLC - installed 2022-06-22) Application /Applications/Google Chrome.app: Google's Chrome browser is notorious for being a system resource "hog." If you prefer the Chrome interface, I suggest that you try using the Brave browser instead. Otherwise, completely remove Chrome and go back to using Safari.
• Performance - Write speed: 61 MB/s & Read speed: 65 MB/s: These are dismal speeds. However, they are typically of 5400 RPM drives. You may want to consider either replacing the internal drive with an SSD or use an external one as you boot drive.
• Clean up - I recommend that you follow EtreCheck's recommendations of removing all of the items in the category.

The good news is that, at least according to the report, your Mac has not had any kernel panics or app crashes within the last 30 days.

How much free space is on your hard disk? If you are too close to full, that will slow things down. The Monterey upgrade is about a 2 Tb download and i don't remember if it dumps the trash afterward or not but try emptying the trash.

My knee jerk response is that your hard disk is failing if it's not out of space. Your hard drive is 8 years old and should be drawing SS checks. Hard drive's lives are similar to dog years. I'd back up the drive immediately if it were me. I'm not familiar with the Mini's but if you can swap out the drive, a 2 Tb SSD is around $200. I personally use a 4 Tb USB for backup which you can get a good one for $100 from Amazon one day. STGX4000400

I've never seen much difference in speed between versions of the operating system and certainly you shouldn't expect it to bog down. With that old a hard disk I'd make frequent backups and replace the drive with an SSD. The SSD is a lot faster than the old hard drives.

After reading the report, the one thing that it doesn't tell you is how many run hours are on the disk drive. That's what you need to know and I bet that drive has more than 50,000 hours on it. To me that report is useless as it doesn't test the hard disk and it's pretty obvious that it's a hard disk problem as the one thing the report said is that data transfer rate sucked. When a hard disk has problems reading/writing it has to make repeated attempt to access the data until it reads it. I don't know the exact number but typically a hard disk with try at least 10 times before giving a drive error so the drive is able to finally get the data but has to try over and over. This will get worse until it finally fails.

There is no problem with 8 Gig of memory, my 2012 Air has only 4 Gb of ram and runs the full Microsoft office suite with no issues. Mac OS is similar to Linux/Unix and is much more memory efficient than a Windows computer. I'm assuming that the computer used to run fine and if memory was a problem it would not have worked properly in the past.

Ask any person who knows hard disks and 5-8 years is typical life for a hard disk. Get a program that tests the hard disk and I bet that will fix it.

LiportoCA wrote:

I didn't mean to be overly vague when I mentioned "everything" being slow, but it's literally everything. From start up, to internet browsing, opening programs, even while writing this reply - I can't point to anything working anywhere near like it did prior to the "upgrade". Is this their way of forcing me to upgrade my hardware? I mean, they were sued for their manipulation of iphones when they got a little out dated, so why not do the same here?

Again… if you have the bottom-spec 8 GB hard disk drive configuration, please follow the blue-text link from my previous reply, and read about the situation, read about why it’s slow, and what you can do to make it less slow.

If you have an SSD and not a hard disk drive, then the reported slowness is unusual, and would be worth further research here, and there are potentially other things to check.

Discussing your more general concerns and your product feedback directly with the folks that work for Apple would appear your preferable path. Use the Get Support link in the upper right of this webpage. And accordingly, I am unfollowing the thread, as I’m not going to be able to address any of that. I do wish you well, here.

It is probably the disk drive failing and having read/write issues. You have to keep in mind that a hard disk is sort of like a record player with the needle floating a hair's width above the record. As the bearings get old the head may touch the disk platter and scrape it. This causes bad spots on the platter which leads to errors. Plus the head positioning mechanism gets worn out and can't position properly.

For fixing computers I am a Windows guy and don't know a lot about Mac diagnostic tools. There should be a diagnostic tool that tests the hard disk and retrieves the run hours or power on hours.

FWIW. One excellent third-party tool, for this purpose, would be DriveDX.

Apple has never provided a means to revert, other than restoring a pre-upgrade backup.

I’d guess that this is an 8 GB / HDD configuration, so an external SSD might be an option.

Here’s a discussion of why the iMac 8 GB / HDD configuration is slow, and migrating to an external SSD:

Why is my hard disk drive iMac so slow? - Apple Community