Apple Notes lag on MacOS

Found this post as I am having the exact same issue. I'min the process of migrating from Evernote, importing one notebook at a time. I'm now only at 910 notes in icoud but Notes on my M1 Max 32 core GPU Macbook Pro 16", with 64GB of RAM and 1TB of storage chokes on this. Anything in Notes is slow as a dog. Moving notebooks, scrolling through notebooks, even scrolling through a single note can be rough. Not to mention, when it's lagging on a notebook, I can't even move the Notes window around to a different part of my screen.

I was so happy when I discovered how good Apple Notes seemed. I was ready to ditch Evernote. Then I discovered how horribly laggy Apple Notes is on even very powerful systems. Sad, I guess I have to keep looking.

It's odd too, one notebook has 59 notes in it. Nothing but short cooking recipes. Lags like a dog. Another has 650 work notes in it, and it's far more responsive than the 59. No rhyme or reason to it, just slow. :(

Is Apple Notes really just this bad?

If it's lagging during the import process, I went through the same thing. But once it was completed, it worked really well. My issues popped up recently and I can't understand what's causing the issue.

I would wait until the importing is complete and then try things. And you'll want to wait until it completes syncing with iCloud. I found that until that was done, it was a little laggy.

Whatever the problem is, it appears to be fairly isolated to MacOS, as I haven't had any issues with Apple Notes on iOS.

I actually ran a diagnostics program and uploaded the report on a separate thread where another user was having the same issue and, like me, had tried a bunch of different troubleshooting efforts. Here's the thread if you're interested.

I may be back to Evernote if this doesn't get resolved.

I'm in the exact same boat.

Apple Notes on iPad: snappy. Apple notes on iPhone: snappy.

Apple note on 16" MacBook Pro M1 Pro: Laggy response to all inputs (clicks, scrolling, arrow up/arrow down, typing, etc.).

I have over 4K notes and I use it a lot. I was trying to use it as a replacement for Evernote. I originally attempted to migrate all notes from Evernote (22K) but that rendered Apple Notes virtually unusable.

I have my own post on the Apple Community looking for help in resolving this. I've tried turning off iCloud sync and re-syncing. I've tried opening in Safe Mode. But no fix on my MBP.

I don't understand why the performance on my iPad and iPhone, where they are 3-4 years old, is very good but the performance on my MBP with M1 Pro, purchased less than 12 months ago, struggles with the Notes app.

Equally frustrated user.

That's part of what I think has created problems for me as well. Note sizes and the content in the notes. I save all bills, emails, scanned documents, etc. to my Notes app and I feel this is part of what bogs down the Notes app.

A customer support rep effectively said the same thing. He said Notes just isn't engineered to handle a high volume of notes, large notes, or notes with lots of content.

I saw another post where a user mentioned that Notes doesn't handle HTML well at hall. When I imported a bunch of Evernote notes that were web page captures, I think that was an issue as well.

I've been having the same problem for a couple years now - slow typing / typing lag only when working in Apple Notes. It was getting pretty frustrating as the lag could be significant at time. No other app on my Mac (or in my iPhone or iPad) do I experience this lag. I once thought it might be caused by intermittent syncing to the Cloud, but offline I experienced the same results.

My recent conclusion via trial & error: I have one really big Note that I use as a Daily Journal. In fact, I copied/pasted it to a Pages document and it's almost 51,000 words. Today, I pulled out the 2023 entries into its own note and the lag is greatly reduced, if not gone completely.

Consider the size of your note. Too many photos, tables, even simply too many characters/words may be increasing memory requirements. When I typed in the BIG Note just now, my CPU usage spiked at 70.2. In fact, just opening that BIG Note made my %CPU spike to 22. However, when I opened a new Note and started typing it never really went over 8.0 (same for smaller one-page Notes).

I had the same effect on macOS Ventura. The issue was that I had a photo in the title area in a few notes. So Notes took the photo as title. Once I added a proper text title and pushed the photo to the text area everything was okay.

The import is nearly instantaneous. I'm doing one notebook at a time and I'm on a 1Gb fiber. It's still dog slow after iCloud is done syncing. I did discover what I think is the major culprit, and that is HTML. Simplifying notes in Evernote, before bringing them over helps immensely. I think Apple Notes is just terrible at interpreting HTML. The exact same recipe folder, once HTML was removed, works as expected and the entire Notes app doesn't crap out.

That's good to know. Thanks for the insight. My challenge is that I already imported 4,000 notes, so I'd have to re-do the entire import process. 😐

But I am tempted, given that you've recognized the HTML issue. I imported a lot of emails that were forwarded to Evernote that included HTML, so I wouldn't be surprising if that's a contributing factor.

I am started to feel this when I copied a lot of ChatGPT screen with some images (icon). Need to redo all copy and paste with Paste with Match Style so it will easing the Notes without images.

My computer is MacBook Air M2 512/8gb

Confirm it fix the sluggishness problem. Don't forget to clean your trash after you delete the images heavy notes.