MBA 2020 in daily use: performance of Microsoft Word?

[Ybersetzer]

Dear all,

I am currently using a 2015 Macbook Air (i5, 5 gigs of RAM, 128 SSD) hooked up to a LG 4k monitor (yes, the 2015 Air actually can drive 4k @ 60Hz) and I use (and need!) Microsoft Word a LOT for my work.

In another thread

Which Mac hardware for ZIPPY Microsoft Word performance?

So I use Microsoft Word a lot, I need it in my line of work, and I am for the most part happy with the stability and performance on Mac. But I do think it is a resource hog and I wish it were programmed leaner. Two pet peeves: - just hitting Command & D in order to bring up the menu for...

forums.macrumors.com

I asked about general performance of Macs with some routine use aspects of Word. It was disheartening to hear that simple things like control & D to bring up the font menu (gives me the spinning beachball and a wait of three, four, sometimes more seconds) are sluggish even on very fast Mac hardware. The reason being apparently (according to forum user scracer): "Microsoft has been working to have a common code base for Windows and Mac (priority on Windows) and as a result has included a compatibility layer for the mac version. That is why each app within Office is 2GB+ on the mac.)

Two questions, one regarding snappiness, the other thermals:

- if you own a 2020 MBA and have it hooked up to an external monitor: how long does it take for the font menu to be ready when you hit control & D the first time (and subsequent times, which should be faster)?


- when you scroll vigorously using mouse or touchpad (and with external 4k monitor, that's the crux), does the fan spin up at some point just from scrolling? My 2014 Air handles web browsing with lots of scrolling on a 4k monitor just fine, but scrolling through even a short Word Document will wake up the fan.

All data points are much appreciated!

 

[Wesseldeg]

Hi, well i don’t have a 4K monitor so my findings may differ alot from your findings. But i havent had a problem running a 70+ word document being edited by 5 people at the same time and running teams on the side. i did encouter the spinning beachball like 2 times, but i think that’s due to word not being 100% optimized for osX (i think, not sure about this)

i use an 34 inch Ultra wide monitor from LG btw

 

[Ybersetzer]

Thanks, Wesseldeg. And was this on an i5 or an i3 Macbook Air?

 

[Wesseldeg]

It was on an I5 with 16gb ram (maybe that plays a part)

 

[MrKennedy]

Sounds a bit silly to me to worry that the base Air couldn't handle Word. I'm sure it performs fine. I have the older 2018 Air (dual core i5) and Word works great. Same as when I had the 2015 12'' Macbook. Using the Air right now hooked up hooked up to my monitor and not seeing any performance issues that you're concerned about in Word.

If you rely heavily on Microsoft tools and their features, it might make sense to get a windows machine.

 

[Ybersetzer]

Sounds a bit silly to me to worry that the base Air couldn't handle Word. I'm sure it performs fine. I have the older 2018 Air (dual core i5) and Word works great. Same as when I had the 2015 12'' Macbook. Using the Air right now hooked up hooked up to my monitor and not seeing any performance issues that you're concerned about in Word.

If you rely heavily on Microsoft tools and their features, it might make sense to get a windows machine.

Thanks for chiming in, but I am not worried about whether the base Air "can handle Word". I adressed two very specific aspects of performance: - bringing up font menu with Control & D, will that beachball / how long will it take and 2: will the 2020 Air handle scrolling through a Word document while hooked up to a 4k display without the fans kicking in.

I am glad to hear though that the 2018 version has no problems in this regard, I thank you for that feedback. So you are saying that hitting Control-D in Word on your MBA 2018 does not give you the spinning beachball? Because that is what happens (the first time after launching the application) on a 2018 MacMini (i5, 16 gigs of RAM).

 

[MrKennedy]

Thanks for chiming in, but I am not worried about whether the base Air "can handle Word". I adressed two very specific aspects of performance: - bringing up font menu with Control & D, will that beachball / how long will it take and 2: will the 2020 Air handle scrolling through a Word document while hooked up to a 4k display without the fans kicking in.

I am glad to hear though that the 2018 version has no problems in this regard, I thank you for that feedback. So you are saying that hitting Control-D in Word on your MBA 2018 does not give you the spinning beachball? Because that is what happens (the first time after launching the application) on a 2018 MacMini (i5, 16 gigs of RAM).

Sorry it took me a little bit to report back. I got the beachball once for 1-2 seconds, every time after control + D there would be a .5 sec (maybe less) beat and the font menu appears as expected. The beachball appears 1 time per document I open. Once you've seen the beachball, it doesn't appear again for that document.

My monitor isn't 4k. Scrolling in word while connected didn't make the fans turn on. Why are you worried about the fan turning on?

I think everyone's tolerance/patience is different, and I could understand waiting a beat for the beachball to appear to be annoying. Depending on the return policy where you live + shop, you could order one and see if you like how it performs?

 

[CheesePuff]

FYI just reading this thread on my 15" 2015 MBP (2.5 GHz Quad-core i7, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB Flash) and Command-D font menu takes 3 seconds on Word 16.37

 

[MrKennedy]

FYI just reading this thread on my 15" 2015 MBP (2.5 GHz Quad-core i7, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB Flash) and Command-D font menu takes 3 seconds on Word 16.37

I think it's a Word on Mac problem. Not a "is my Mac powerful enough to run Word?" problem

 

[Ybersetzer]

Sorry it took me a little bit to report back. I got the beachball once for 1-2 seconds, every time after control + D there would be a .5 sec (maybe less) beat and the font menu appears as expected. The beachball appears 1 time per document I open. Once you've seen the beachball, it doesn't appear again for that document.

My monitor isn't 4k. Scrolling in word while connected didn't make the fans turn on. Why are you worried about the fan turning on?

I think everyone's tolerance/patience is different, and I could understand waiting a beat for the beachball to appear to be annoying. Depending on the return policy where you live + shop, you could order one and see if you like how it performs?

Thanks a lot, MrKennedy, for taking the time to report your user experience regarding these two issues with your 2018 Air. Much appreciated!

I agree in a sense (as you wrote in a follow-up post) that this is mainly a "Word-on-Mac"-problem - I really wish Microsoft gave us Mac-users a leaner and less resource-hungry software!


About the fan revving when scrolling (2015 i5 Air with 4k monitor):

well, yes, it is not the end of the world of course, the screen does not stutter etc., it is just that I find the sound of the fan having to work harder annoying. (My 2015 has the old cooling-system where the fan is ALWAYS on, no matter what, @ at least a base speed of 1200 RPM, but the nice thing is that the 1200 RPM baseline is – to my ears and for all practical purposes - SILENT. And since I know that the same machine connected to the same monitor can scroll complex webpages without revving up, it simply irks me that scrolling through my Word docs is not silent. (I spend MANY hours a day working in Word.))

So that is why I am trying to gather user experiences regarding the performance of the new Macbook Airs in these matters.

Again, thanks for your input!
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FYI just reading this thread on my 15" 2015 MBP (2.5 GHz Quad-core i7, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB Flash) and Command-D font menu takes 3 seconds on Word 16.37

Thanks for that data point. 3 seconds to just bring up the menu (not to actually even perform a change of any sort yet) on a Quad-core i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. Wow.

Microsoft should be ashamed ....billions of dollars in the bank and can't or won't deliver a lean product.

 

[adrianlondon]

i5/8/256 no external monitor.

3 seconds first time (after opening Word and selecting a blank document). Just under 2 seconds each subsequent time. On the basis that it's loading the details of every font, and displaying a sample of one of them, for a non-Apple app, it seems ok.

Pages is much faster, but the font selection pop-up is less useful imo.

 

[RiaKoobcam]

Thanks a lot, MrKennedy, for taking the time to report your user experience regarding these two issues with your 2018 Air. Much appreciated!

I agree in a sense (as you wrote in a follow-up post) that this is mainly a "Word-on-Mac"-problem - I really wish Microsoft gave us Mac-users a leaner and less resource-hungry software!


About the fan revving when scrolling (2015 i5 Air with 4k monitor):

well, yes, it is not the end of the world of course, the screen does not stutter etc., it is just that I find the sound of the fan having to work harder annoying. (My 2015 has the old cooling-system where the fan is ALWAYS on, no matter what, @ at least a base speed of 1200 RPM, but the nice thing is that the 1200 RPM baseline is – to my ears and for all practical purposes - SILENT. And since I know that the same machine connected to the same monitor can scroll complex webpages without revving up, it simply irks me that scrolling through my Word docs is not silent. (I spend MANY hours a day working in Word.))

So that is why I am trying to gather user experiences regarding the performance of the new Macbook Airs in these matters.

Again, thanks for your input!
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Thanks for that data point. 3 seconds to just bring up the menu (not to actually even perform a change of any sort yet) on a Quad-core i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. Wow.

Microsoft should be ashamed ....billions of dollars in the bank and can't or won't deliver a lean product.

For what it's worth, I boot into a Bootcamp partition whenever I have to do anything MS Office heavy. I've spent years trying (and failing) to find a solution to the fans going crazy on Office in MacOS, where they are absolutely silent in Windows.

A long term solution to having to do this is a tricky thing - it's not in Microsoft's business interests to optimise Office for MacOS, and it's not in Apple's business interests to optimise native Windows on Mac hardware. In fact, I imagine they'll discontinue it in the next few years.

Nevertheless, Bootcamp on the i3/i5 Macbook Air works great for performance. It is terrible for battery life though, as for some reason Apple has not enabled Intel processor power saving technology that's been available since the 5th gen.

But if you're working from a workstation and are connected to power, you don't have to worry about the sluggishness you've described (and I've experienced) when using Office on MacOS.

It's not ideal, but I can't see either side budging on this one. This trend of 'no, you should only be using Apple native apps, everything else is poorly optimised, so use Safari and Pages, they're just as good!' is just BS.

MS Office is the industry standard, as is Chrome, and even the new Chromium-based Edge has more market share than Safari, so that's what people are developing and optimising for.

Both MS Office and Chromium-based browsers suck at basic functions on MacOS compared to Windows - things as simple as scrolling and resizing windows. I wish it wasn't the case, but I don't see an end in sight.

 

[adrianlondon]

MS Office is the industry standard, as is Chrome, and even the new Chromium-based Edge has more market share than Safari, so that's what people are developing and optimising for.

I use Pages and Numbers for documents I create for my own use, and switch to Excel and Word for anything that others may need to open/edit (where a pdf won't do).

The trouble with switching is that after using the Apple apps, I find the MS ones weird and non-standard for accessing basic functionality. And after using the MS apps I find the Apple ones irritatingly lacking in functionality.

As for internet browsers, I use Firefox (Nightly version) so am staying out of that one

 

[RiaKoobcam]

I use Pages and Numbers for documents I create for my own use, and switch to Excel and Word for anything that others may need to open/edit (where a pdf won't do).

The trouble with switching is that after using the Apple apps, I find the MS ones weird and non-standard for accessing basic functionality. And after using the MS apps I find the Apple ones irritatingly lacking in functionality.

As for internet browsers, I use Firefox (Nightly version) so am staying out of that one

I'm exactly the same as you - if it's something that a business or large organisation has to use, I have to use Office because there are so many weird compatibility issues between Apple's apps and the enterprise standard. They're great for personal use.

And I'm the same in switching between the two - sometimes I'm like 'damn Pages is easy to use' and then after using Office for something complicated I'm like 'how can you not include this feature that everybody needs!'

There's no perfect answer - ideally these big tech companies would come together, decide on a universal standard and all shake hands. But, you know, money and marketshare. It's good that MS offers a version of Office on MacOS, and it's good that Apple provides a version of Windows for their hardware.

Even though both are probably intentionally gimped to entice customers over to 'the other side', it allows users like us choice, even if it's not perfect.

Firefox seems to have been absolutely killing it lately and there is nothing better for consumers than having genuine competition. I'd love it if we could have less Chromium based browsers, especially Chrome itself. Having One Browser to Rule Them All that is designed to hoover up your data for a company that makes its money selling it is no bueno.

 

[Ybersetzer]

I had a chance to perform a simple test at the local Apple Store (Germany): open Word, type a few words and hit Control +D and see how long it takes for the fonts menu to appear the first and the following times on: MBA 2020 i3, MBA 2020 i5, Macbook Pro 13 inch 2TB ports (8th gen CPU) and MacBook Pro 13 inch 4TB ports (10th gen CPU).
Results: i5 was noticeably quicker than i3 MBA. The i5 managed to open the font dialog without a spinning beach ball after the second or third time of using the menu. The i3 would give a (granted: brief) spinning beach ball every time.

The MBA 2020 i5 was faster than the MacPro with the 8th gen CPU: this was to be expected, this is a 100 percent "burst" action and the MBA i5 has a higher single core score than the entry level Macbook Pro 2020. Also possibly the faster memory helps. Macbook Pro 13 inch 4 TB ports with 10th gen CPU was the fastest, though the difference between it and the MBA i5 was not very noticeable.

 

[Ybersetzer]

After one more round of googling the issue: gee, I wish I had come across this earlier: opened "Font Book" on Mac and went through the gazillion of fonts I never ever need and disabled them.

On my lowly 2015 MBA the font menu now pops up without spinning beach ball. Yay! Anybody else, if you find the wait annoying: do check it out .....

 

[christophosphorus]

Tested this on my MBA and it takes quite a long time along with the spinning wheel displayed (as you mentioned).

The delay/lag you're seeing is (edit: apart from the fact that there is a long list of fonts being pulled as you decribed above) because the CPU is momentarily hitting peak temperatures (99*C) and throttling.

This is somewhat unrelated, but there's a thread here where MR members have been modifying their laptops to run cooler (thereby allowing more performance without as much throttling). I've also been experimenting with disabling "Turbo Boost," which slows down the peak CPU speeds but, as a result of not allowing TB to increase core temperatures as much, also results in more steady performance without peaks/throttling. Might be something worth looking into! I have been extremely disappointed by the performance of my MBA, and it is clear that the thermal issues are what causes most, if not all, of the hangups on our laptops.