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Choppy Scrolling on new 2013 MBA

I was experiencing very choppy scrolling in chrome 27 using the i5 macbook 13", even though when i checked the cpu it was barely being taxed at all.

Finally decided to give chrome beta 28 a shot and the scrolling is MUCH improved. Was getting worried for a second there :cool:
 
Just opened my new 11" i5 1.3, 8GB RAM, 128 SSD. I am noticing the choppiness. However, it is doing a large download in the background. I'm Gonna stick Maverick's on it. Try it on a fresh install. I've pretty much just been updating and/or restoring from back up for the last five years on my various MacBooks and Airs. Haven't done a fresh install of my apps in a long while.
 
my macbook air (base with 8GB) is arriving tomorrow.

Hopefully this is just a driver issue.

Has OS X had any patches yet for new air 2013 drivers?
 
I just bought the Macbook Air 11'' 2013 and discovered this thread while trying to find a solution to the choppiness. I've been experiencing it too.

I assumed it was maybe related to the battery life because I didn't notice it until it was around 50% that it was slightly choppy but once it got down to 30% it became really noticeable and scrolling would take up to a second to register with no smooth transition from the top of the page to the bottom. By 20% battery it became unusable and to the point where I'm considering returning it. The whole point of this MBA was to be able to use that extended battery life but if it keeps getting worse then it's really just a 4.5 hour machine. Right now I'm typing this on a Dell XPS and it's at 12% and the scroll is smooth as ever.

Anyway, I shut it down and waited for it to recharge to 100%. The scrolling became smooth again. It may also be related to heat because it's also slightly cooler.

I'll update if this thing goes into slow motion after 4.5 hours again. If it does, I'll be returning it while it's still less than 14 days.
 
jasonhaley said:
I just bought the Macbook Air 11'' 2013 and discovered this thread while trying to find a solution to the choppiness. I've been experiencing it too.

I assumed it was maybe related to the battery life because I didn't notice it until it was around 50% that it was slightly choppy but once it got down to 30% it became really noticeable and scrolling would take up to a second to register with no smooth transition from the top of the page to the bottom. By 20% battery it became unusable and to the point where I'm considering returning it. The whole point of this MBA was to be able to use that extended battery life but if it keeps getting worse then it's really just a 4.5 hour machine. Right now I'm typing this on a Dell XPS and it's at 12% and the scroll is smooth as ever.

Anyway, I shut it down and waited for it to recharge to 100%. The scrolling became smooth again. It may also be related to heat because it's also slightly cooler.

I'll update if this thing goes into slow motion after 4.5 hours again. If it does, I'll be returning it while it's still less than 14 days.
Click to expand...

Is the laggy scrolling only in Safari? Or is it system wide?
 
jasonhaley said:
I just bought the Macbook Air 11'' 2013 and discovered this thread while trying to find a solution to the choppiness. I've been experiencing it too.

I assumed it was maybe related to the battery life because I didn't notice it until it was around 50% that it was slightly choppy but once it got down to 30% it became really noticeable and scrolling would take up to a second to register with no smooth transition from the top of the page to the bottom. By 20% battery it became unusable and to the point where I'm considering returning it. The whole point of this MBA was to be able to use that extended battery life but if it keeps getting worse then it's really just a 4.5 hour machine. Right now I'm typing this on a Dell XPS and it's at 12% and the scroll is smooth as ever.

Anyway, I shut it down and waited for it to recharge to 100%. The scrolling became smooth again. It may also be related to heat because it's also slightly cooler.

I'll update if this thing goes into slow motion after 4.5 hours again. If it does, I'll be returning it while it's still less than 14 days.
Click to expand...

I wonder if it has to do with CPU throttling. It would make sense: when the battery is getting low, I'm sure the OS tries to throttle the CPU more to save battery. Maybe try to do something CPU-intensive while the battery is lower and the scrolling is choppy, to force the OS to bump up the CPU speed, and see if the choppiness goes away?
 
Mine lagged for the first few hours. Once I was done installing everything and restarted it, it became smooth as butter.
 
Just wanted to update everyone. To answer one poster above, the problem was system wide (I tried 3 programs). Like I said, when I recharged everything was back to normal. I'm now at 10% and the scrolling seems to be solved since it's not choppy any more.
I'm starting to think the problem was a heat issue because I'm using this in a cool room and on a cool desk but when I was at 10% it was on my blanket on my lap and getting super choppy (though I still remember it being slightly choppy at about 50% when it was in cooler conditions).

I didn't do any updates so I don't think it's a driver issue.. but it may even have just been some bug. If it re-occurs I'll update again but right now it's not a problem in the least bit.


On a side note: If someone wants to try to recreate the problem they could try putting the laptop on a surface that doesn't allow it cool properly (i.e a blanket or mattress). I know it might sound silly to do that if you've never done it before but keep in mind that I've had other laptops (both fanless PC, fan-PC and the original MacBook) where I would do that for years without a problem (at least for the last decade). So there's no reason for me to not expect the same of this laptop.
 
I installed 10.9 Mavericks. Mine is still occasionally choppy on scrolls. But not always. I mostly notice it in Safari. Though it did happen in a finder window scrolling though my DropBox folder. It is not constant. I just dinked around with scrolling the previous page full of response to this post and it was choppy for a couple of the scrolls going both up and down, but then it leveled out and was fine. Smooth. I run iStat menus and noticed that it will spike one of the four cpu core graphs sometimes when it scrolls but that it was not necessarily choppy when it did. Don't know what, if anything, that means or why it would spike the CPU after the page is completely loaded. Maybe ads or page refreshes.

Personally, it is only a minor irritant and I would certainly not consider taking/sending it back because of it. I agree with one of the above posters that it could be driver related... Though I am running 10.9 and it did it in 10.8 so maybe not?

I am just happy that I have no WiFi issues of any kind as some people have claimed. That would be a take-it-back issue for sure.
 
My 13" 2013 Air (Ultimate) was also a bit laggy after setup but that was due to Spotlight indexing the disk. After indexing, everything works smooth. Scrolling is especially smooth in Safari and quite good in Chrome. Chrome has never been as smooth as Safari for me.
 
just unboxed my 13" 1.3/8/256 and noticed the safari scroll lag so i looked up this thread. it only seems to lag when you are scrolling at reading pace, but is fine for fast scrolling. installed chrome 27 and it seems to scroll fine at both speeds.
 
fongyuen said:
just unboxed my 13" 1.3/8/256 and noticed the safari scroll lag so i looked up this thread. it only seems to lag when you are scrolling at reading pace, but is fine for fast scrolling. installed chrome 27 and it seems to scroll fine at both speeds.
Click to expand...

When you boot the machine for the first time, spotlight is indexing so it could be that.. try restart in a couple of minutes and it should go away.
 
HiDEF said:
When you boot the machine for the first time, spotlight is indexing so it could be that.. try restart in a couple of minutes and it should go away.
Click to expand...

yeah, true. but does it still index if i haven't put anything on it?
 
I noticed this as well when I played with the new MBAs at the Apple store. It only occurs in safari when you are zoomed in using that new double tap feature (that no other browser has). I never use safari so it was instantly noticeable to me but it is subtle enough that I could imagine someone getting used to it. I think safari just has issues because scrolling while in that zoom mode isn't as smooth as it should be on my 2012 air and I'm pretty sure this exact kind of lag (specific to safari and being zoomed in) is a complaint of rmbp owners as well. Probably safari just needs an update. Everything else on the MBA I tested was fairly smooth even though I was trying to stress the system but safari had some stutters.
 
Choppy Scrolling on MBA After Time Machine Restore

Just received my new 2013 MBA 13" i7 8GB 512GB SSD. During the initial setup I restored from my Time Machine backup (which was from a 2012 model MBA). Once restored I started using my new MBA and found the graphic subsystem to have a problem. Choppy scrolling in Safari, graphic stuttering, image tearing, using Lauchpad and scrolling between screens was awful. Interestingly, firing up Parallels and running Windows XP or 8 was just fine, but all OS X graphics were performing badly.

After Googling around for a solution, finally called Apple. We tried resetting PRAM and SMC, then tried reinstalling OS/X, problem still persisted. To find out if I had a hardware issue, I then formatted the Mac partition and did a clean install of OS/X. And it works perfectly. No graphics issue. Smooth scrolling on the exact web pages that were horrendous a couple hours earlier (it takes 2+ hours to perform the clean install).

So now we know it's something coming over from the backup of my 2012 MB Air (which is a 13" i7 8GB 512GB SSD model as well). The only question now is how to I get all my applications and data moved over without bringing along the unwanted graphics problem.

So with a completely clean install and the graphics problem gone I created a new admin user, logged into this account, and used the migration assistant which is different than the option to restore during the initial setup. I only say it's different because once it completed, I was able to login and everything was perfect. No choppy scrolling issues! For anyone else upgrading, I would be sure to use the migration assistant after logging into the machine and creating yourself an admin account different than the account you are about to restore.

- Jim
 
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When I got my 2013 i5/8gb/128 MBA, I restored from the time machine backup of my 2012 MBA. At first I was seeing laggy scrolling in Firefox/Chrome, but nothing else. I thought it was related to my time machine backup. However before setting up as new, I did a proper restart (I selected shut down, then turned it back on manually) and I'm happy to report no more laggy scrolling. Saved me the trouble of having to set up from scratch.
 
Clearly, there is an issue with these new Air's with scrolling in Safari.

Let's hope apple fix it.
 
I noticed lag on mine too intially in chrome.. its not indexing..


I had to do this to fix it:

Go to the special URL "about:flags" and make sure the following two are enabled:

Accelerated overflow scroll Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
Threaded compositing Mac, Windows, Linux

That will improve scrolling a LOT!!
 
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