Macbook Pro Retina 13" late 2013 (Haswell) UI Lag

Went also to an Apple Store today and by the way I tested a 13" MBPr. It had the same issues my MacBook show. The lags are very minor but it makes to overall experience with a $1300 device a little bad.
Also downloaded XCode and the Graphical Tools addon to see FPS. And for my issues (see few posts ahead) it really seems to be a software issue. The frames won't get higher if resize a windows or open a folder from dock, CPU load was minimal. But when i scrolled through a webpage very fast the frames increased by x3 and CPU load increaed a little bit. The refreshrate for these UI "movements" is set too low in my eyes.

I can live with these little lags but as I already said: $1300

I've been following this thread and pondering over whether this problem stems from hardware and/or software. Since the introduction of the first-gen rMBP in June 2012 the hardware side saw major bumps (on the CPU side from Ivy Bridge to Haswell; on the memory side now up to 16GB is available; on the integrated GPU side from Intel HD 4000 to Iris Pro 5200 and on the discrete GPU side from NVIDIA 650M to 750M). The software side saw two major bumps, from Mountain Lion to Mavericks and now to Yosemite, not to mention their incremental updates.

All in all, for the machines that have this problem, there seems to be 2 facts: 1) provided that this problem is addressable, Apple have had tons of opportunities to address the UI lag problem within the last 2,5 years with 5 model iterations, but apparently the problem still exists. 2) in fact the majority view seems to be that Yosemite made the problem even worse!

IMHO, in light of these two facts, one thing seems to be certain: this problem will never be fixed and likely to get worse in the upcoming OSs and due to wear and tear of the machines even under normal use.

PS. Considering that not all machines are affected, this inherently supports another forumite's idea that the problem is a hit and miss. But I really, really don't want to believe in this. Because how come Apple can condone this for 5 model iterations that went through major upgrades in every aspect within the last 2,5 years?? In other words, if this was a hit and miss in the first-gen rMBP released in June 2012, I don't want to believe that Apple deliberetaly released 4 subsequent models with major improvements that are still hit and miss.

ok i turned on Increase Contrast in System Preferences/Accessibility/Display and the UI lag is gone, it does away with all the translucency effects and changes how some elements look but i'm ok with that, the whole system just feels much snappier and smoother.

When Apple don't fix it during the year, it just means "We don't care at all. You are just a wallet with legs, we don't care about your life at all".

- iTunes has the same bug since 2005.

- The sync with the iphone is screwed since I've had my first iphone 3GS (5 years ago)

- The animations are not smooth for 2 years on os x.

Apple doesn't care at all about the software. They don't care at all about the customer anymore. They just want money, at any cost. They don't care about their image, they don't care about bugs, they don't care about customers that are on their own forum that write thousand of complains. They don't even care about the developers reporting bugs.

And for the previous year, nothing proved me wrong, unfortunately.

I really hope they will fix it quickly, but I don't think they care about it.

Zatixo wrote:

When Apple don't fix it during the year, it just means "We don't care at all. You are just a wallet with legs, we don't care about your life at all".

I really hope they will fix it quickly, but I don't think they care about it.

I must correct your first statement: This not a problem of the current year or the last 12 months-- Apple has not been fixing this problem since the introduction of the first rMBP in June 2012, therefore for about 2,5 years.

I completely agree with your last statement. In fact ignoring for 2,5 years is the utter proof of that.

PS. As a matter of fact this thread's title is not appropriate. It must be "UI lag in rMBPs" as it applies to all rMBPs, be they 15 inch or Ivy Bridge. The extremely long deliberate ignorance shows it would likely extend this problem into Broadwell rMBP, Skywell rMBP, etc.

I can see a lot of threads popping-up with the same issue but for the new iMac 5K. 🙂

People are complaining about having 2-3 FPS on mission control animations even on maxed out models.

If it's a software issue, maybe they will address it now as people are dropping $3-4K for these and they get choppy UI...

i have bought my rMBP just three weeks ago and there is a huge lag after upgrading to Yosemite while i was on Mavericks it wasn't so huge now if i want swipe between desktops i has like 10 fps or so.... I think that for 2500 euro machine it is a little disappointment that the UI is not fixed to be stable on such high resolution.. My mates have MBP and it is really smooth and it is a three year old ntb... I hope that apple will fix this ASAP since then i am going to downgrade to Mavericks because this lag is really sorrowful... I have tried every possible way how to fix this problem and of course nothing worked... Just one thing was working, the Display Menu app, that can select the resolution you want, not just the resolutions offered by OS X but when i have chosen the 1680x1050 just like the retina resolution offered by OS X it was like smudgy or something like that... I think fuzzy is the right word.. so it wasn't a good fix for this problem but according to this it seems to be aa DPI problem ;( you can see the difference down on the pictures ..

mathis92 wrote:

....My mates have MBP and it is really smooth and it is a three year old ntb...

And they run OSX Yosemite on their non-rMBP, right?

If so, considering that according to other's accounts this problem also exists on the 5k Retina iMac, then Apple clearly has a problem of not properly driving retina resolutions...

Heliora,

I went to system preferences -> Accessibility and increased the contracts. Well the lag is ~80% better for some reason! I've tested mission control - it is smooth with contrast on and incredibly laggy with contrast off.

It seems it is the software thingy.

Hi,

Reset PRAM resolved UI lag problem on my Macbook pro 13" late 2013 (2.8Ghz i7, 16GB RAM), but just after 10 to 15 minutes, the problem start again.

Hopefully, there is any solution for it.

Want you know that I've got the same issue going on on my iMac Retine - Increasing contrast in accessibility has fixed it

Definitely a software issue, particulary as I have been able to play gotham city in full 5K resolution with a very smooth frame rate!!

Yup, I just got my 2014 mbpR on October 12, 2014. For the first week, I noticed no lag nor choppiness. But after about a week of having the Macbook, I updated to Yosimite. Initially, everything worked smoothy. But I want to say after about 4 or 5 days, I started to notice some choppiness but didn't think much of it. But after about on the 7th or 8th day, it was noticeably bad When typing, the computer was a few seconds behind . The genie affect was annoyingly jerky. Scrolling down the page on Facebook was a pain and took forever. And at this point, all i really did was use PhotoBooth and took a lot of pictures and videos. So, since I didn't have much on my hard drive, I just reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Yosimite. It worked like a charm. Everything went back to buttery smooth:) That worked for about 3 weeks , until last night, things got terrible again. I noticed the Dock jerking as it become visible from hidden. The genie effect became choppy again. Same with the scrolling on web pages. I did not notice the typing lagging as in the first go round though. So i decided to reformat my hard drive again, and go back to Mavericks, thinking that would be a fix. Well, although it is not nearly as bad as it was yesterday, it is not running as it should, or as it was the first week I had Mavericks. Now, when I zoom in the trackpad on a certain page or photo......it zooms in immediately , but it takes about 2 seconds to focus cleary-which has become annoying these last few hours:) And although scrolling on web pages are working fine at the moment, at times I do find there to be random choppiness and then it disappears. With the way it is working right now, I can live with it. But I have a feeling the Lag is going to come back really bad as it has done the last few times. For some reason, I believe my PHOTO Booth might have something to do with it. It seems that , when I start loading up videos and photos in PHOTO BOOTH.......my computer starts becoming noticably choppier and lagging. IT seems to happen when I start saving pictures to my hard drive too. NOt sure why,but oh well:)

same here. I bought my rMBP in september. 2.6Gz, 16 ram 256 ssd

In yosemite things will get slow and laggy after a few day. if i restart the mac things will be really smooth and the lag will come back after a day.

This is going to be my first and last macbook if apple don't do anything to solve this problem in the coming version

I have a mid 2014 model. 16g ram with 256 ssd

LAGGY AS ****.