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

I tried playing video again. Even a 1080p video that works fine on my 4 year old Mini is unwatchable on this top of the line 2015 Macbook Pro.

But as happened earlier when I tried to play Starcraft, apparently something gets hosed up over time. Rebooting has seemed to fix it, at least for a while. Scrolling in safari is buttery smooth, all animations are fine, swipe to full screen, dock show/hide, etc, etc. Everything's working. But I wonder for how long.

I also tried resetting the PRAM as mentioned in this thread. https://david.gyttja.com/2013/01/21/fix-lagging-display-performance-on-retina-ma cbook-pro/

I can't tell for sure if it was just the reboot or the PRAM reset and other steps in that post. But at least for the moment, its working.

Just to say to everybody scrolling to the end of this forum what helped me. On page 3 the solution of this guy. Thanks so much.

Problem is Macbook Pro 13inch late 2013 supersloww response in scrolling, even via the scrollbar.

The restart did the trick.

thanks again

Hi there,

good news here: I just called Apple Support and the guy helped wonderfully!

What you gotta essencially do is: open the finder and then, from the menu bar, click onGo and Computer. In the window that pops up choose the column view and click onMacintosh HD, Library. In this folder you have to move to the trash the content of the following folders:

• Caches;
• LaunchAgents;
• LaunchDaemons;
• StartupItems.

Before acting the deleting be sure to copy the last three folders on the desktop, in a way to save a copy of their files. You have to move another element to the trash and it's something called likecom.apple.windowserver.plist and you can find this one guy in the Preferences folder (always in the Library one). Once done, DO NOT EMPTY THE BIN but close the Finder and go on the menu bar again and click on Go; while pressing the Alt/Option button, click on the Library voice (which is hidden and will appear only by pressing Alt). When opened, you have to do something similar to the other time; so

• Look for Caches folder and move the content to the bin;
• Look for the Internet Plug-ins folder and do the same;
• Again for the LaunchAgents folder (you don't need to save a backup of the files this one time);
• Move on to Preferences and look if the com.apple.windowserver.plist is present. If not, go back to the Library folder;
• Last, choose the Saved Application State folder and move the content to the bin.

Ok, now again DO NOT EMPTY THE TRASH but restart the computer. You should now have everything working as it was when you got the Mac.

Unfortunately I don't know if this will work for you and I don't wanna assume any responsibility for problems but it worked for me and my MBP is now superfast again.

Hope your one will be ok again and this post will help the others who could encounter the same issues 🙂

I am trying to gather some data about which models have the issue, to isolate it and help Apple to solve it. If you want to help me, please fill in this table with your results:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

Hi there,

I know this is an older thread and this probably isn't relevant to any of you any more. I just bought an early 2015 retina Macbook Pro. It's the base model with 8gb of RAM, 128gb of flash storage, and a 2.7GHz Intel i5 processor. It does have Iris 6100 graphics as well. I was running OS X Yosemite and was also having similar problems. The UI in certain areas ,ESPECIALLY iTUNES, was extremely laggy. The addition of Apple Music didn't help either. After upgrading to OS X El Capitan it has resolved most of the issues I was having. The speed increase with Metal helped with animations in apps (including iTunes) and gave the rest of the system a refresh as well. If you're still having this issue or are new to the thread like me, I recommend updating. I'm still having issues while scrolling in the "For you" section of Apple Music. However this is a small part of the UI. Im also having some issues with some new features introduced in El Capitan like Split View resizing. Here I've experienced huge drops in frame rate. This is a completely new feature though, so this will most likely get worked out in future updates. Anyway, if you're still having these issues I HIGHLY recommend updating.

Thank you for your post. I did upgrade to el captain recently and noticed that in some areas it's actually gone worse.

I still can't believe that such a powerful machine isn't capable to run smoothly its own OS.

I do not believe in apple's perfection anymore. They've been absolutely failing and frustrating for few past years.

P.S.: split view is the most ridiculous implementation I've ever seen. So clumsy and slow. Try same on windows. It works much easier and more intuitive.

(I'm not a windows guy btw).

350 Replies - 98546 Views - more than 2 years since this post was initiated and still NO FIX!

From my point of view Apple has a serious problem with driving retina displays. I have 2 MacBooks, both Late 2013 models: one is 15", the other 13". Both of them have UI lag problems. Based on the sheer amount of people that viewed and replied to this topic it seems to me that this is a general problem, far bigger than the "StainGate" one. Having enough of the UI lag and trackpad freezes and all the problem associated with such an expensive machine, ****.

<Edited by Host>

I'm currently running the oldest MacBook Retina (12") with 8 GB ram. I'm on El Capitan and the lag nearly disappeared after the update to it. Windows 10 also runs like butter. Just want to reiterate, it's not a hardware problem! Sorry to see yours is still having issues.

I don't know about the MacBook. This thread it's about the Pro, especially the Haswell versions out there. To me and a huge amount of people (based on the topic statistics) the problem hasn't disappeared at all. The lag is very noticeable and present. It should not be! More than 4 versions of OS X have been released since the lunch of the rMBP and a lot more Pros have been lunched since then. Apple should be ashamed of itself. We are paying 2k+ € on a machine that's not even cable of running it's own UI smoothly.
Yes, once I restart the laptop it runs fine without any lag at all, but 2 days after that it runs like a piece of junk with 16GB of Ram, an i7 Quad Core CPU and Intel Iris Pro with 1.5 GB of video memory. Screw Apple!

Of course! I'm sorry, that was a typo. Will fix. I have the oldest 13" Macbook Pro Retina. The one from 2012 that's almost four years old and it runs like butter now. I was on this thread a couple of years ago when I did have lag in Mavericks and Yosemite. The issue has slowly gone away, with most problems solved with El Capitan. This computer has the HD4000 graphics processor. So yeah, just wanted to clarify that the issue is not present on all retina machines, and not even necessarily on those with less power. So it's something that CAN be fixed by a software update, as I said years ago, just don't know why it hasn't been fixed for everyone.

I might have a solution for the lag problem.

So I've had this problem with my Macbook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) OS X El Capitan, the lag was just horrific, switching fullscreens was a nightmare and everything just seemed to lag lag and then lag some more, I've tried tons of solutions suggested by many forums, from reseting the PRAM and SMC to trying to change the display's resolution and even tried to erase and reinstall the OS but unfortunately none worked, I've literally spent weeks trying to figure out a solution, until I started noticing that the lag was the worst during daytime and that it was an intermittent lag, and one day I was sick of how much automatically adjusted brightness was annoying so I just turned it off and to my surprise the lag immediately stopped, it turns out that that feature was the culprit and the lag appeared only when the screen brightness was changing automatically and now my Macbook works like a charm, so here's what you can do:

Go to System preferences - Displays, and uncheck "Automatically adjusted brightness" in the "Display" tab.

I hope this works for you as well.