2019 MacBook Pro is laggy after upgrading to Tahoe

jorgitovargasjrjr wrote:

I'm on a 16-inch, 2019 MacBook Pro (Intel i9) and have just upgraded from Sonoma latest to Tahoe 26.2.

UI in general feels quite laggy: windows animations, scrolls, Photo app layout renders slow when loading collections, and Teams screensharing makes it all even worse.

The only workaround for this was to force using high-performance graphics, by disabling "Automatic graphics switching” at System Settings > Battery — as found on Reddit.

Is there a way to improve performance but keeping automatic graphics switching?

Have you shut down and restarted more than once since your "just upgraded"....(?)

>Shut Down

further you can:

—A SafeBoot Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

Does a quick disk repair before it fully boots up, and certain system caches get cleared and rebuilt, third party system modifications and system accelerations are disabled temporarily.

Login and test. Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.

This test will tell you if third party interference; most extensions etc are not loaded in safe boot mode.

—Test issue in another user (or guest user) account Change Users & Groups settings on Mac - Apple Support

This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account. 

*** (if you are using a wireless keyboard with rechargeable batteries— connect the charging cable, this will make the wired keyboard successful Safe Boot your Mac.)

unplug all non-essential peripherals when testing

Uninstall all third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus

all known to cause issues on the macOS

< Teams screensharing makes it all even worse >

For your third party apps—

—if in doubt search the developers website or contact their: Support/Help/FAQ/Known issues/compatibility/updates…

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/show-your-screen-during-a-meeting-90c84e5a-b6fe-4ed4-9687-5923d230d3a7

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/present-content-in-microsoft-teams-meetings-fcc2bf59-aecd-4481-8f99-ce55dd836ce8

It is possible there are processes running in the background that are using significant resources. Check Activity Monitor, CPU tab (sort by % CPU) and Memory tab (sort by Memory) to see what's running hard.

Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

I had the same experience with the same machine. Integrated graphics were not so good. Discrete graphics worked ok. But, in any case, kernel_task would fire up on a regular basis and slow everything down. My hypothesis was that the machine was overheating - maybe the fans needed cleaning. I never could isolate any third party software culprits. In the end, I dumped the intel MBP for an M4 MacBook Air (and I migrated the exact same software setup to the new machine). What a difference. The improvement in performance was remarkable and extremely gratifying. Of course, that wasn't exactly a cheap fix...