Macbook still slow after update and downgrade.

I’ve got a refurbished MacBook Pro with an SSD drive which I bought with Catalina in February this year. It was working fine and at a decent speed until I updated to Big Sur which slowed it down. I downgraded it to Mavericks which was the OS it shipped with then back to Catalina. It’s still slow and awkward to use. I’m using it for Logic Studio and is barely usable It was handling Logic well before I updated. It’s a late 2013 A1502 MacBook Pro with 256GB SSD drive. What would you recommend to bring it back to normal speed? Would it benefit from a new SSD hard drive and start again or wait for it to catch up with itself after the update?

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Posted on Sep 26, 2023 6:49 PM

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Sep 27, 2023 10:15 PM in response to 7Richard7

Run the third party app EtreCheck and post the report here so we can examine it for clues.


To check the health of the SSD, you can run DriveDx (free trial period) and post the complete DriveDx text health report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. Unfortunately Apple's SSDs don't have much health information, but it never hurts to check.


You can also try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately the diagnostics don't detect most issues.


Don't waste money on an internal SSD yet. If none of the above provides us any clues, then the next step would be to install macOS to an external USB3 SSD (even a hard drive would be Ok, but it will be naturally slower). If performance is good when booting to an external USB drive, then an internal SSD failure is most likely (or possibly an issue with the file system or third party apps installed).


Make sure to disconnect all external devices in case one of them is causing a problem.


Does this laptop have the original Apple OEM SSD or is it perhaps using a third party internal SSD?

Macbook still slow after update and downgrade.

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