imac M4 going to work for me? imovie

No… I literally do not do ANYTHING on it, It’s just idle, websites are very slow, and everything feels sluggish, You can at least edit and playback 4K videos, but THAT IS NOT a thing to push the Mac to use more than the 8GB physical memory, If you want to do something a bit heavier, your Mac will definitely struggle, It’s not enough, at least for my case, but the thing is… like I’ve said, I don’t even do anything on the Mac.. and it’s very sluggish, Battery health is above 80%, disk usage does not pass 80%.

How can I tell what is wrong with your Mac? I know nothing about it. You wouldn't ring up a doctor, tell him you weren't feeling well and expect him to diagnose the problem from that brief description.

It is certainly not normal for a Mac to behave like that.

You need to post a question (maybe on the Sequoia/Tahoe forum), giving as much info as possible about your Mac and its symptoms.

Quite likely you will be asked to download and run etrecheck to test and report on your Mac.

There are so many ways users can mess up their machines unintentionally but the good news is that they can usually be cured quite simply once the reason for poor performance is discovered.

I have just asked Gemini AI to suggest some reasons your MBA may be performing badly and it came up with these. However, they are far from comprehensive and it could be something entirely different. Only by asking on the relevant forum will you be likely to get a complete answer.

The base M1 MacBook Air is still a capable machine, but major operating system upgrades like macOS Tahoe can easily cause severe performance drops and browser lag if background processes, configuration conflicts, or intrusive third-party utilities are present.

The primary culprits causing an M1 MacBook Air to feel "dead sluggish" on macOS Tahoe fall into distinct technical categories:

1. Intrusive Third-Party "Cleaner" Apps (CleanMyMac, Antivirus, Optimizers)

Installing utilities like CleanMyMac, Mackeeper, or real-time antivirus tools is often the direct cause of system-wide lag:

• Persistent Background Daemons: These apps run constant monitoring daemons in the background to track memory, temperature, and disk activity. This continuous polling consumes valuable CPU cycles and memory.
• Aggressive RAM "Cleaning": Memory optimizers forcibly flush inactive RAM to disk. Modern macOS manages RAM dynamically; forcibly clearing cached memory forces the system and web browsers to constantly reload web pages and app data from scratch, making browsing feel painfully slow.
• Corrupted System Caches: Cleaning tools sometimes wipe active macOS or browser caches that the new OS requires, triggering endless background rebuild loops.

2. Post-Update Background Indexing & Machine Learning

Immediately after a major upgrade, macOS carries out heavy background maintenance tasks:

• Spotlight & Photo Indexing (mds, mdworker): The system re-indexes every file on the drive for Spotlight and processes media libraries.
• CoreSpotlight & Memory Leaks: OS upgrades occasionally cause system daemons (like corespotlightdor WindowServer) to lock up or leak RAM, driving memory swap usage into gigabytes even during light web browsing.
• Solution: A simple system reboot often clears post-update memory leaks.

3. Unified Memory (RAM) Bottlenecks & Browser Extensions

The base M1 MacBook Air typically came with 8GB of Unified Memory:

• Browser Memory Hogs: Modern web browsers (especially Chrome, Edge, or heavy Safari setups) treat every open tab and extension as an isolated process.
• Outdated Extensions: Ad blockers, password managers, or security extensions that have not been updated for macOS Tahoe can lock up browser rendering engines, causing tabs to freeze or scroll with stutter.
• Swap File Pressure: When 8GB of RAM fills up, macOS uses the internal SSD as "Swap Memory." If background apps and heavy browser tabs compete for RAM, web pages stall waiting for memory swaps.

4. Outdated Electron Apps Running in the Background

Many popular desktop apps (Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Spotify, VS Code) are built on the Electron framework:

• Older, unpatched Electron versions are notorious for causing high CPU usage and window compositor lag (WindowServer) on newer macOS releases until the apps are updated.

• I’ve reset it multiple times
• Updated to Tahoe after resetting the Mac, set up as new.
• No cleaner apps, No anti-viruses, Already know how macOS security works
• Also tried to set it up and restore from my sequoia backup on Tahoe, it worked but still sluggish
• No outdated applications
• No other web browsers are used except safari, with light usage
• Already know that the first week, It will be slow due to indexing of the major update, but it is STILL sluggish, after waiting for weeks

SYSTEM-WIDE LAG, not just browsing performance drops, I will post about it now.

I have Tahoe on both my minis and there is no problem whatsoever.

Then why is my MacBook Air lagging?

“Configured” it? Configured what on the M1 exactly?, Adding to what you’ve said, I’m only using 55% of my Mac’s storage, so this is not a reason for its performance drop in Tahoe