MacBook Pro (Early 2015) slow after Monterey; downgrade OS?

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MacBook Pro (Early 2015) slow after Monterey; downgrade OS?

I have an early 2015 MacBook Pro 13inch, intel multi core i5-5257U 2.7GHz, 8GB DDR ram, SSD hard drive.

Recent Geekbench 6 results:

Single core: 1026

Multi core: 2020

I recently updated to Monterey, however since then the laptop is running exceptionally slow so I’m going to downgrade the OS. Has anyone done this? If so, which software did you chose to downgrade to? I’m not sure which to go with, maybe Catalina? I want something speedy and snappy, but will allow for latest software installations without slowing it down.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

MacBook Pro 13″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Jan 29, 2026 3:02 AM

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Answer 1

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Servant of Cats

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Jan 29, 2026 6:41 AM in response to CaptainWotsit

Leave the laptop turned on and plugged into power for a night or two, and see if things get better.

After a macOS upgrade, Spotlight sometimes likes to rebuild the entire "reverse index" of the disk. This can take a bit of time on Macs with large mechanical hard drives – though I would expect it to go a bit faster on a Mac like the one you have, which has a SSD instead of a hard drive.

Note that most third-party Web browsers now require Monterey or later. The exception is Firefox … whose current version still runs on Catalna. The current version of LibreOffice will also run on Catalina, but I believe the next one will require Big Sur or later.

With Microsoft 365 / Office, I am not sure whether you even could successfully reinstall it "from scratch" on older versions of macOS (like Catalina, Big Sur, or Monterey) that Microsoft no longer supports.

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