Fastest Most Stable macOS for Intel i9 MBP 16"

[AlienSexGod]

Hi which is the Fastest Most Stable macOS for Intel i9 MBP 16" in your experience?

I have kept updating in the hope things would get better but Ventura blows locked up in a kernel panic or overheat 1-3 times a day.
It's also slower than previous MacOS.
I think they optimised code for M1 & M2 and just created bloat for intel.
Minimum OS is Catalina. If Catalina is the fastest I'll go back to that. It's hard to remember for sure but vaguely I think it was a bit slower every OS.
I don't need extra features just snappiness in the finder, search and loading apps. I have 64Gb 8Tb SSD so don't really want to upgrade the mac.

Has anyone done since by side testing on different SSD boot drives to see?

 

[Rich B22]

I don't have your machine, however, guessing it's from 2019. If true, there's no reason, if all else is good, it should be running into problems. I run Ventura on a 2017 iMac i5 with no issues. I did find that Catalina was a hot mess and couldn't wait to upgrade to Big Sur.

You seem to have plenty of memory and storage (unless you've filled up 8TB). Have you ever reset the PRAM and SMC? Doing so could help. The only other thing I can think of is to run something like the free Onyx utility to clean up extraneous files hanging around. I have done that periodically for years and it does work well. Just make sure you have at least one GOOD current backup, just in case.

Also, have a look at these links https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-your-mac-runs-slowly-mchlp1731/mac or

It's pretty basic, but maybe something will click. If you google "macbook running slow", you'll find tons of suggestions.

Other than that, I don't know what else to advise. Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable will chime in, otherwise, it may be time to have a professional take a look.

Good luck

 

[Fishrrman]

Monterey...

 

[Wokis]

Ventura. I have similar specs to yours and my Intel MBP running Ventura still flies for light and heavy tasks. They even bothered to recompile large parts of OS and apps to make use of AVX2, something that didn't benefit Apple Silicon with Rosetta, so it was purely because they saw ways of improving performance for their Intel users.

Sounds like you're having issues with your hardware or specific software configuration, OP. I recommend taking @Rich B22 's advise and start troubleshooting other things than the OS version.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Got any more details about "overheat 1-3 times a day"?

Have you tried testing a new User Account to see if these issues are account-specific?

When is the last time, if ever, that this MBP had a "clean install"? When you purchased it did you use Apple's Migration Assistant to move from a prior Mac…and…have all of the macOS upgrades just been on top of the prior version?