Q: Mountain Lion UI Lag on rMBP !!! (Let's Make this thread serious and hope for a fix)

I've been using a June 2012 Macbook Air (dual core i7/8GB/256SSD) for the last two days to compare performance. Honestly; it is a completely different experience. Safari is ridiculously smoother. Navigating with Mission Control and between desktops is flawless. I loaded a Win 7 VM with parrallels and as many other applications as possible (only have 17MB of free RAM when i was done) and the system was still extremely smooth.

It just doesn't make sense why the rMBP cannot provide a similar experience with a quad core i7, 16GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics carde; even with the extra pixels/retina display.

This was the Apple experience I was hoping for when I purchased my rMPB.

Just thought I would share my experience.

It has to be a software issue that Apple is dragging their feet on fixing. But after installing WebKit last night I've had an amazing internet browsing experience. Little to no lag, even in things such as Blackboard that were unbareable before. It's amazing how much of difference there is! Even resizing the window is smoother than when I would resize a safari window. Same Safari experience with all the features.

However, outside of WebKit things are still laggy, audio stutter earlier was terrible when I was writing some code in Aptana. I had to turn off the computer to get it to go away. Every time I did anything it would like stutter and and crackle. Beyond annoying!

My retina MacBook Pro has had terrible graphics performance problems for a couple of weeks. I searched all over various forums and tried everything: resetting SCM, manually selecting discrete/integrated graphics card, deleting graphics kexts, etc. Nothing helped until I found this: https://discussions.apple.com/message/19880198#19880198

Now my rMBP has silky smooth graphics again!

The directions in that post are a little hard to understand so I cleaned them up here:

Step 1: Delete system windowserver preferences

1. In the Finder, from the menu bar, select "Go -> Go to Folder..."
2. Enter: /Library/Preferences/
3. Delete the file called com.apple.windowserver.plist

Step 2: Delete user windowserver preferences

1. In the Finder, from the menu bar, select "Go -> Go to Folder..."
2. Enter: ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/
3. Delete all files that start with com.apple.windowserver   (On my rMBP, there was one file called com.apple.windowserver.12AFB147-95D6-5C70-8F62-C1E4F2BE81BE)

Step 3: Reset the PRAM

    (These instructions are from http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379)

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

Hopefully this helps others with bad graphics performance on retina MacBook Pros.

For anyone that wants to check out the problematic plists from my rMBP, here are the files:

http://jherrman.com/slow-rmbp-2012/com.apple.windowserver.plist

http://jherrman.com/slow-rmbp-2012/com.apple.windowserver.12AFB147-95D6-5C70-8F6 2-C1E4F2BE81BE.plist

Jeremy Herrman

Problem not only in GUI lagging.. I'm sure not only I have such problem like will describe bellow:

Laptop charging or not, it's open, and I'm going away... After one hour i'll be back, my laptop will sleep - it's ok, but when i'm trying to wake it up, it RUNNING from beginning all my apps, it means that browser will be started and will try to load again all tabs content, why ????

Sometimes when I'm coming back I see log in screen, why ?

I never could know what I will see, on screen, when I'll be back. Sometimes everything is ok, sometimes it is waking up tooooo looong, sometims i see log in window... and in almost any cases it will run again my all apps, it's killing me, what they did with so good OS ?

Mountain Lion supplemental update released

http://m.tuaw.com/2012/11/21/os-x-mountain-lion-supplemental-update-2-0-fixes-ke ychain-errors/

what does this update do? what is keychain?

Does it help us out with the lag in Safari / Chrome?

Does it help you out in the web browser also? Or is it still lagging?

Nothing changed

I've just tried this solution and now my rMBP won't start. I think I may have just killed my Machine

better wait until apple release the official fix.. to scary to down any changes now haha... however my laggy experiences not that bad and not really impacting my final usage.

Yeah, I've got a few regrets now . I'm gonna have to do a full system reinstall. I will leave things like this well alone in future hahahaha.

You know what? I gave up entirely. I took my rMBP back to the Apple Store and they're going to swap out the motherboard, display and SSD drive. Sorry for the discouragement, but I think you all should do the same :(

For the record, while I was at the Apple Store, I was playing with the rMBP 13" demo units, and right there, in my face, was one 13" that lagged and Lego blocked, exactly like ours, while the 5 other units didn't have any problems whatsoever. Just saying :-/

Which makes me wonder if it IS actually a software issue...  If they all have the same software, why would one lag and another be fine?  Unless the apple store is forcing the use of the Discreet graphics card on some but not others?