2010 MBP slow after Yosemite

having same issue. after upgrade, everything is much, MUCH, slower. ugh.

forgot to mention, mid 2011 iMac. 16gb ram, OWC Mercury AccelsiorExtreme SSD hard drive (via thunderbolt [it's super fast, trust me]).

My Early 2009 MacBook (6Gb RAM, 310 Gb HDD spare, 1 extra monitor) was also unusably slow till I simply ticked the Reduce Transparency option under System Preferences. I slept the Mac, woke it, and discovered the Mac 10x faster than prior to not having it ticked.

Does this work for anyone else?

I'm having exactly the same issues. Mine's a late 2012 15" with 8gb ram and 2.6 L7 processor. I've tried everything and Yosemite is a dog. If I reboot it goes well for 10mins or so then slows and slows until it's unusable.

So far so good on the transparency setting change

Unfortunately the transparency settings did not solve my only issue, OS X Yosemite takes a long time to load up on a MacPro 2010, 4GB memory, 5400 RPM hard drive which is not fragmented and has 120GB of free space.

Of note, the Apple startup screens grey. The bar under the apple logo moves very slowly until it reaches just under the apple logo which is about 1/2 through the progress bar. Then the progress bar speeds up and completes the last 1/2 of the loading very quickly.

I'm starting to suspect the issue might be solved by more RAM based on what I see in the activity monitor's memory stats but other people with 8GB seem to have a slow load up time too.

Hmmmm. I might try a reinstall.

Yosemite will run like a bit of a pig on machines that:

(A) Still use the Toshiba 5400RPM HDDs. No way around this. At this point one must upgrade to SDD. I recommend the MX100 or Samsung 840EVO.

(B) Have 4GB of RAM. Again, time to upgrade to 8GB. All the transparency and additional processing happening in the background put pressure on the system resources.

In so much as loading time, no, RAM will not improve this.

You need a faster hard drive. Quality 250GB SSDs are only $120-140 at the moment. Less if you can find a sale.

After more playing with the compute, transparency settings helped a bit but didn't solve the issue. And I am not buying a new hard drive for this computer. I'll go back to Maverick first.

BTW here is the load time of Yosemite on my macbook pro 2011, 5400 RPM drive with about 120 gigs free and not fragmented, 4GB RAM.

1 minute and four seconds.

Once loaded everything is as snappy as OS X 10.9 even with transparency active.

I'll be buying a new hard drive or SSD if it will fit in the machine along with more RAM (hopefully 16GB) as well as a new battery (it needs it). For me it is cheaper than buying a new system.

Road Hog, be careful.

Depending on your system, the max amount of RAM it can 'read' may only be 8GB.

The SSD should be able to fit into any system short of Macbook Air, in which case you would already have an SSD. 🙂

Trust me, an SSD alone is going to make your system feel like it was hit with a 100 shot of Nitrous. I dumped the Toshiba drive (why Apple used such a slow spinning platter vs. 7500/10000 I'll never get) in 2012 when SSD drive prices got a little more rational. I still paid a premium but haven't regretted it since, and this year upgraded to a larger capacity SSD with nearly DOUBLE the speed of my former SSD and it costs $50 less than what I paid 2 years ago.

The performance leap will make you slap your hand to your head and wonder why you didn't do it sooner as well as question if you need a new machine for another 2/3 years.

Unless there's some groundbreaking shift in technology before 2016, I certainly won't.

BTW - My system load time from a cold boot using a 256GB Crucial MX100 SSD is in the 20-25 second range including the few seconds it takes me to input my password. I could shave 2 seconds off that time had I bought the Samsung 840EVO, maybe another second with the 840PRO, and probably another 2 seconds with the 850 ... when the 850PRO is released, probably down another 2 seconds. The PRO version have marginally faster Read speeds, but much faster Write speeds.

You are correct. My system max's out at being able to access 8GB of RAM. I checked Apple's upgrade guides & Otherworld Computing and noticed this too.

PRAM and SMC reset did the trick for me on my iMac.

First time i am posting but thought i had to, i had the same problem with 2012 MBP with 8GB RAM. Boot up time so slow compared to Mavericks and Safari was slow and really annoying....I gave it two days to see if it improved - it did not. So my solution was time machine back to Mavericks and machine back up to speed. Hopefully Apple will sort it without having to replace hard drives...