2015 12" MacBook Big Sur poor performance

[tomscott1988]

HI all,

Just a word of warning for any 2015 MacBook owners upgrading to the first release of Big Sur.

About 2 months ago I did a fresh install of Catalina on the MacBook so its a recent install, I went ahead and installed Big Sur yesterday and it is almost impossible to use, everything is laggy the UI, every app. For example clicking between safari and messages and it takes 3-4 seconds for the app window to appear.

Very frustrating to use, obviously the laptop was slow when it was released but with frequent apple and adobe updates the machine ended up being pretty snappy for what I use it for and Catalina seemed pretty good all round, with Big Sur that has all essentially gone away. It does feel like (for those that remember it) running tiger on a power PC Mac with rosetta.

I obviously haven't tried to format and install natively which may make a difference but for the 95% of people they will take the standard upgrade route and for this machine it makes it almost unusable.

This will probably improve with upgrades down the line and the 2015 MacBook was one of the slowest modern Macs released. Mine is in perfect shape never had an issue with the keyboard etc and I love the fact its so small and light there is no penalty to taking it anywhere especially for using with Plex or Netflix on the go. Unlike my iPad Pro the screen will sit at any angle so find it more comfortable for content consumption. I work as a photographer and when im out on a shoot I can quickly look at my images and rate them quickly without having to import them to Lightroom and then sync them with the cloud which saves a lot of time.

Has anyone else had the same issues? Anyone got any solutions?

I have used CleanMyMac X but as its a new install there wasn't anything to clean, Big Sur seems to the taking between 20-35% cpu usage at idle no processes in the background are hogging resources. I have also turned on reduce motion.

In the mean time I am going to downgrade back to Catalina which is a shame.

Cheers

 

[Mike Boreham]

This didn't happen with my 2017 12" MacBook. You could try doing a safe boot (clears caches) or a reinstall over existing from Recovery or with a bootable USB.

 

[Z3man]

I haven't upgraded yet as i was a bit afraid what has happened to you might have happened to me.

I cant help you but just wondered if you could answer me a question about Safari, i am a bit worried about how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen. Especially as we only have a 12' screen so space is important.

At the top of the page there are three bars, the Toolbar, then another bar which i think might be called a Favourites bar, then your Tabs bar. All three bars take up a lot of space.

I assume the Tabs bar is only there if you have more than one tab open, please confirm this.

But it is this second bar i am most worried about, the one i think is called a Favourites bar, can you get rid of this bar altogether.

I think i could put up with the stupidly thick Toolbar, but not with this Favourites bar as well, i think together they will take up too much space. Especially with multiple tabs open as well.

 

[Mike Boreham]

I haven't upgraded yet as i was a bit afraid what has happened to you might have happened to me.

I cant help you but just wondered if you could answer me a question about Safari, i am a bit worried about how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen. Especially as we only have a 12' screen so space is important.

At the top of the page there are three bars, the Toolbar, then another bar which i think might be called a Favourites bar, then your Tabs bar. All three bars take up a lot of space.

I assume the Tabs bar is only there if you have more than one tab open, please confirm this.

But it is this second bar i am most worried about, the one i think is called a Favourites bar, can you get rid of this bar altogether.

I think i could put up with the stupidly thick Toolbar, but not with this Favourites bar as well, i think together they will take up too much space. Especially with multiple tabs open as well.

Does this answer your question:

 

[Z3man]

Thanks Mike, that's a great help.

Now i know that i might take a chance an install Big Sur, providing there are not loads of people on here having problems. I have the 2015 model like the OP.

 

[tomscott1988]

This didn't happen with my 2017 12" MacBook. You could try doing a safe boot (clears caches) or a reinstall over existing from Recovery or with a bootable USB.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply. It might well be because the 2015 is a poor performer the 2017 MacBooks perform much better than the 2015. I have reset pram/nvram didn't help. Just seems like its not optimised maybe down the line 👍🏻

 

[OliveroNYC]

Big Sur on MacBook in case you want to do a direct comparison with your current setup.

 

[OliveroNYC]

2017 1.3 i5 8GB.
Big Sur feels a bit sluggish. Some beachballs, some slow-loading apps. Safari feels slower to load sites.

 

[objektør]

I'm on a day one rMB 2015 and Big Sur. I came from Mojave because I never got Catalina to function snappy. Normally I do a clean install but because I had no hopes on Big Sur being any better than Catalina, I just upgraded. (My Mojave is a clean install from just a few months ago). Big Sur is surprisingly good. I notice no difference with Mojave. Only the first few hours it was lagging a bit. Indexing maybe?? No idea.
Can't say anything about battery life. I still use the original battery (870 cycles, only 60% health left), it lasts about 2 hours maybe. (Use it mostly on mains now. As long as the battery doesn't swell, I'll wait with my upgrade to an Apple Silicon Macbook, hoping for a 12,9''Macbook or slimmed down MacBook Air).

 

[objektør]

I haven't upgraded yet as i was a bit afraid what has happened to you might have happened to me.

I cant help you but just wondered if you could answer me a question about Safari, i am a bit worried about how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen. Especially as we only have a 12' screen so space is important.

At the top of the page there are three bars, the Toolbar, then another bar which i think might be called a Favourites bar, then your Tabs bar. All three bars take up a lot of space.

I assume the Tabs bar is only there if you have more than one tab open, please confirm this.

But it is this second bar i am most worried about, the one i think is called a Favourites bar, can you get rid of this bar altogether.

I think i could put up with the stupidly thick Toolbar, but not with this Favourites bar as well, i think together they will take up too much space. Especially with multiple tabs open as well.

Totally agree. I felt something was irritating me and noticed that the toolbar is 'much' thicker. The overall design feels more spacy and open but this one is a minus for me. I use to have the 'favorites' icon in the toolbar that I use a lot more now to show or hide the Favorites bar. Another option is to hide or show the menu bar automatically (in the 'dock and menu bar' settings). Move Safari all the way to the top of the screen. I don't use it my self because the menubar then covers the top of the toolbar when it automatically shows. Maybe ok for some, not for me.

 

[tomscott1988]

So I left the laptop open and wouldn't let it sleep for a few hours and went back to activity monitor and found

com.apple.photos/imageconversionservice

I only have a 256gb model and in Catalina I had iCloud photo sync turned off because I have more data in my cloud than space on the laptop. Big Sur turned it back on so was trying to download 300+gb which was pinning the CPU.

Turned it off and its better, but still pretty laggy. Seems to be getting better with time.

 

[Mike Boreham]

So I left the laptop open and wouldn't let it sleep for a few hours and went back to activity monitor and found

com.apple.photos/imageconversionservice

I only have a 256gb model and in Catalina I had iCloud photo sync turned off because I have more data in my cloud than space on the laptop. Big Sur turned it back on so was trying to download 300+gb which was pinning the CPU.

Turned it off and its better, but still pretty laggy. Seems to be getting better with time.

The way to del with having a bigger Photos Library than hard drive is to turn on the Optimise setting. That is what its there for. I have had a 600GB iCPL on a 250GB internal without problem.

 

[EugW]

I would suggest just biting the bullet and doing a fresh Big Sur install. Multiple backups first though!

For example a fresh install of Mojave was noticeably faster than High Sierra updated to Mojave, and this was on my 2017 Core i5-7600 iMac with 24 GB RAM.

2017 1.3 i5 8GB.
Big Sur feels a bit sluggish. Some beachballs, some slow-loading apps. Safari feels slower to load sites.

My 2017 m3 in Big Sur feels quite decent, and roughly similar to Catalina. I have a 16 GB model, but I don't know if that matters here because AFAIK I haven't been stressing memory limits.

 

[ZachNathan]

I would suggest just biting the bullet and doing a fresh Big Sur install. Multiple backups first though!

For example a fresh install of Mojave was noticeably faster than High Sierra updated to Mojave, and this was on my 2017 Core i5-7600 iMac with 24 GB RAM.

Honestly, just have the important documents/files backed up to your choice of cloud (iCloud for me), then do the fresh reinstall. I have the entry level 2015 MacBook model, and it's really noticeably better from both a performance and battery point of view after a clean install.

I keep a tight grip on unnecessary programs/widgets/etc, so that may help.

I have a RAM purge app installed.

I bit the bullet and gave up Chrome for Safari, and since then it really does seem like my general performance is renewed.

I expect to keep this thing for a few extra years if I can maintain this kind of performance, maybe just keeping it on Big Sur going forward (also planning on a new battery before this model is vintage in 2022).

 

[ColdShadow]

same here iMac Late 2015 with SSD here,Big Sur is noticeably sluggish, heavy and slow.I notice mild lag too.
very disappointing,considering going back to Catalina..🥲

 

[objektør]

Big Sur on my 2015 rMB worked pretty decent to begin with. But lately it's becoming more and more sluggish. More often I see the beachball and Safari pages are loading slow. Same with opening apps compared to Mojave. I'm not a heavy user and don't have many tabs or apps open at the same time. Lots of free disc space.
Won't do anything about it because I got my hands on a 2017 'new' base model 12" rMb from 2019 with only 7 cycles.
Sold this machine (885 cycles, still on original battery). The whole deal costs me 350$. I was hoping for a M1 rMB but that didn't come and maybe never will. The 2015 model served me well and I hope the 2017 will too (with some cpu improvement as well)
I

 

[EugW]

Big Sur on my 2015 rMB worked pretty decent to begin with. But lately it's becoming more and more sluggish. More often I see the beachball and Safari pages are loading slow. Same with opening apps compared to Mojave. I'm not a heavy user and don't have many tabs or apps open at the same time. Lots of free disc space.
Won't do anything about it because I got my hands on a 2017 'new' base model 12" rMb from 2019 with only 7 cycles.
Sold this machine (885 cycles, still on original battery). The whole deal costs me 350$. I was hoping for a M1 rMB but that didn't come and maybe never will. The 2015 model served me well and I hope the 2017 will too (with some cpu improvement as well)
I

How is your experience comparing the 2015 vs 8 GB 2017 m3? Which model 2015?

I haven't noticed a lot of beachballs, but I have the 16 GB 2017 m3. I didn't buy the 2015 because even 2015 I thought it was a borderline in terms of speed. It wasn't slow per se, but it didn't seem to have much reserve.

 

[objektør]

How is your experience comparing the 2015 vs 8 GB 2017 m3? Which model 2015?

I haven't noticed a lot of beachballs, but I have the 16 GB 2017 m3. I didn't buy the 2015 because even 2015 I thought it was a borderline in terms of speed. It wasn't slow per se, but it didn't seem to have much reserve.

Right now I'm still on my day one base model 2015 rMB (m3, 8gb). I will let you know when I get my 2017 base model next week. I will run Mojave on it because there are some apps I need that stopped working on Big Sur (even one of them is 64 bit). I tried Catalina for a while but it was sluggish compared to Mojave (which was quite smooth).
Read some (of your) posts about the 2017 model so I'm hoping for an even better experience on the 2017 model. Slightly better CPU/GPU, second gen butterfly keyboard, faster SSD. Same 8gb ram but normally I don't run heavy apps on it.

 

[objektør]

Sold my day one 2015 rMB (890 cycles, 54% battery health) and got my second hand base 2017 model rMB. (8 cycles, 96% battery health).Whole deal costed me $330. Instead of the hassle of changing battery (at least $250 here in Norway, no Apple store) I now got a 'new' machine with a bit faster CPU/GPU and improved keyboard.
I installed both Mojave and Big Sur on the 2017 model (dual booth). Both function very well. No lag or beachballs. Smooth scrolling. The 2015 model was struggling more and more esp. with Big Sur.
Compared to the 2015 model this one is much snappier. Especially opening apps with large files (e.g. keynote with 1-2gb files). The keyboard is more pleasant as well. Never had any trouble with the 2015 keyboard but this one feels more responsive and 'clicky', as if there is more travel.
It felt 'uncomfortable' to buy almost 4 year old tech as I could buy the M1 MBA which is way faster than this and has at least double the battery life but the rMB is good enough for my needs (even the 2015 was ok for what I do). And this way I can still use Mojave for some apps that don't work on Big Sur.
The rMB footprint (weight and size) is unbeatable. It 'weights' out all the cons. For my use there are no cons.
Now I can wait and see when (if at all) there will be a 12" M1 rMB. Or a slimmed down 13" M2 MBA with smaller bezels and a bit lighter. Might take at least a year or two.