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

I sold my early 2013 rMBP and purchased a mid 2014 rMBP. No problems so far besides Safari crapping out on me once in a while.

I just downgraded the OS to Mavericks and now its all buttery smooth 🙂

I actually had Mavericks on it when it was new and the lag was the same or worse.

I mean some stuff doesn't lag but it the FPS drop a lot which bothers me so that's why I couldn't hold onto it.

Otherwise it was a good computer.

with OSX 10.9.5 its perfect. If you willing to give up Continuity and the new AirDrop its the best stable OS.

I have the Mid 2014 MacBook Pro 15" and Yosemite 10.10.1 UI was pretty laggy specially when i try to open a folder from the dock. I got so frustrated and downgraded, now its perfect with 10.9.5.

You can actually force to use discrete GPU with gfxcardstatus application. Did anyone try, does that fix the UI lag?

I have myself just purchased a MacBook with iGPU only and now considering to return and get with dGPU instead... or maybe different laptop altogether...

Anyway would be great to hear from mac owners with dGPU if forcing discrete chip solves it or at least improves it to some extent.

I would say it is slightly better on the Intel gpu than on the gt330m for MacBook pro 2010... So nothing to do with the power of the gpu. It has to do with Apple.... But Apple doesn't care.

Bearing in mind that not all the lag issues in this thread are probably of the same issue, but in general, forcing discrete graphics can help the issue temporarily, but even that eventually lags as well. There is a third party application called 'gfxCardStatus' designed for this purpose and is quite useful. If you were just purchasing a new MacBook, I would hope that you don't have these issues, or that it is at least minor. My mid 2014 rMBP model seems to work perfectly, but the lag was so prevalent in the old one that I was forced to sell it because it was hampering my productivity.

Yes I have just received my mid 2014 15" macbook. It's the one with iGPU only and UI performance is barely acceptable... Not really... It is worse on mission control, spaces, notifications swipes. Disabling transparency pretty much solves it, but that is sad that for high end laptop you have to disable default UI features to make it perform well.

I must say I am rather picky of UI smoothness, other random person might say that it runs fine. But I definitely notice that animations are nowhere near 60fps, sometimes better, sometimes worse, at average probably around 30fps, if that. maybe later i will fire up XCode's FPS measure tool to be objective.

I have read in other forums that users by forcing 750m chip are able to get perfectly smooth animations. If that really is the case then I would like to switch to dGPU macbook while i still can.

Have anyone tried 10.10.2? Are there any improvements?

I installed 10.10.2 and my first impression was that it was somewhat improved. But now that I try again I think it was just a placebo. What was for sure improved is switching between tabs in About This Mac, before it was really laggy, now it is perfectly smooth. Though that did not really matter to me or anybody really I think. it is overall UI animation in mission control, dock grid expand animations etc were the ones that were giving problems for most. And they feel similar as before. It could be slightly better, but hard to say. For now if I need smoother anims, I just disable transparency in Accessibility options and that helps a lot.

Thanks, I almost pulled the trigger and updated. It looks like I'll stay with Mavericks for some time... Can't afford to downgrade one more time...

It's super smooth for me now. It was laggy for me on 10.10 and 10.10.1, the 10.10.2 betas were better but not perfect. Now it's as smooth for me as it is on my mom's identical machine that is still on Mavericks. It's finally where I expected it to be.

No offense but sounds like bulshit to me.

I've done clean Yosemite reainstall twice to no avail.

The only only improve I notice is when I turn off the silly transparency.

Regardless all the hype-ups about the new OS, Yosemite is the shittest OS apple has ever released.

I'm sincerely surprised how slow and laggish a new macbook late 2013 can be. All I can do without ui lags is web browsing.

$1,500 for a laptop that cannot handle smoothly its own interface! Thats crazy. Im never buying Apple products anymore.

Its getting worse and worse with every software update.

SOLUTION:

So heres what fixed the problem for me. I had the exact same choppy animation and scrolling and what Ive come to find out that on some retinas its the low power graphic card thats causing it. Problem is this card is only suppose to be triggered when the laptop is not hooked to the charger (to conserve the battery) and apparently on some laptops the logic board is not aware when the cord is in that it needs to change the card its using so it continues to use the low power card. I know most of use would like to use the high power card at all times in this case and you can do that by:

going to Preferences/energy saver and unchecking "Automatic graphics switching"

After about 5 seconds everything started running smoothly including scrolling and animations.

We do not have that luxury of the " automatic graphics switching" on the 2014 MBP retina 13". At least I don't.