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Scrolling and UI Choppy on M1 Macbook Air

T

themacmeister

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 13, 2011
20
13
Just purchased a new M1 MacBook Air and the iPad Air. The Macbook's scrolling and UI seems noticeably choppy compared to the iPad. Is this due to the inherent differences of iOS and MacOS or is this hardware issue. Thanks in advance.
 
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Hiredgoon6 said:
I am comparing an M1 MacBook Pro vs. Air. Scrolling on the Air is noticeably choppier on some websites than the Pro.
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How can 1 GPU core make a difference in scrolling? When most of the time it is 80-90% unused. People just imagine things sometimes to make their purchase more justified. I have used both M1 machines.

On the scrolling issue, yes scrolling is bad on my MBA too compared to my iPad Pro 11. Noticeably worse in Safari. I suggest you use Chrome or Brave Browser.

In fact, scrolling is the only thing I am not liking about these new M1 macs. Hope they can improve through updates.
 
anonymous888 said:
How can 1 GPU core make a difference in scrolling? When most of the time it is 80-90% unused. People just imagine things sometimes to make their purchase more justified. I have used both M1 machines.

On the scrolling issue, yes scrolling is bad on my MBA too compared to my iPad Pro 11. Noticeably worse in Safari. I suggest you use Chrome or Brave Browser.

In fact, scrolling is the only thing I am not liking about these new M1 macs. Hope they can improve through updates.
Click to expand...

We don’t know that it has 1 less GPU core, beyond the base Air, we have 8 GPU cores too.

Out of curiosity, not that I’m really looking for problems, I’m just always curious if I can reproduce something, what websites do you see issues with?

So far I’ve not noticed any issues compared to my iMac. I’ve not compared it side-by-side with my iPad Pro, I’m not sure that I will. Largely because I think it would be unfair to compare the MacBook screen to the ProMotion display of the iPad Pro.
 
TrueBlou said:
We don’t know that it has 1 less GPU core, beyond the base Air, we have 8 GPU cores too.

Out of curiosity, not that I’m really looking for problems, I’m just always curious if I can reproduce something, what websites do you see issues with?

So far I’ve not noticed any issues compared to my iMac. I’ve not compared it side-by-side with my iPad Pro, I’m not sure that I will. Largely because I think it would be unfair to compare the MacBook screen to the ProMotion display of the iPad Pro.
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You can try it on Twitter. Scrolling is slightly jittery during the start and when the animation ends. I am comparing it to iPad Pro. It's sometimes worse on other websites.
Even when limiting iPad Pro to 60hz you can easily notice the difference.

This same jitteriness you can encounter sometimes throughout the UI. Example scrolling inside the Stocks app.
 
Hi all,

I noticed this as well, first thing when I got my M1 MBA. Went back to the iPad Pro and compared side by side.

To alleviate matters, I added an ad blocker to Safari on the mba. The juttering seem to get a lot less now.

not butter smooth scrolling down and up though. Good example this actually is this MacRumors websites, scrawling up and down all the different new posts.
 
I have no stutters on Twitter in the ARM version of Chrome, but I do in Safari. The scrolling is also completely bugged out on YouTube in Safari; Sometimes it gets stuck and I cannot scroll up or down, unless I move my cursor to the left of the comments in the comment section.

My suspicion is that something is wrong with Safari.
 
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HatMine said:
I have no stutters on Twitter in the ARM version of Chrome, but I do in Safari. The scrolling is also completely bugged out on YouTube in Safari; Sometimes it gets stuck and I cannot scroll up or down, unless I move my cursor to the left of the comments in the comment section.

My suspicion is that something is wrong with Safari.
Click to expand...
YouTube's css is making safari unhappy, you can find a workaround here
 
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anonymous888 said:
How can 1 GPU core make a difference in scrolling? When most of the time it is 80-90% unused. People just imagine things sometimes to make their purchase more justified. I have used both M1 machines.
Click to expand...

Imagining things? I'll trust my own eyes, thanks. Don't be too quick to dismiss others' issues because you did not experience it.

I actually put both machines through my workload for 2 weeks. The Air was choppier when scrolling large documents on Word, OneNote, and large listings on Amazon. Those were my findings weeks ago and were echoed by others on Reddit. With apps being updated, it's probably better now.
 
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I'm running the latest beta on my Air so I see some stuttering on occasion. I think some of it has to do with the differences between how MacOS and iOS render webpages and scrollviews in general. I know iOS Safari doesn't render web pages and pdfs like Mac. iPad will scroll first, render fully once scrolling stops, while MacOS never does this. Also scrolling is only using a low power core(s) on Mac but I'm pretty sure iPad does this as well. iPad does have a 120hz screen so I do think that it make up most of the perceived difference.
 
jerryk said:
I use a pi-Hole server to get rid of most ads on web sites. Removes up to 60% of the traffic going to a browser. Pages really fly.
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I use an adblocker as well (1blocker). It does a great job of blocking everything I find annoying but, MR is still stutters a little when scrolling. I think that that is more an MR problem than anything else, as I haven't noticed the problem elsewhere.
 
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Apple_Robert said:
I use an adblocker as well (1blocker). It does a great job of blocking everything I find annoying but, MR is still stutters a little when scrolling. I think that that is moire an MR problem than anything else, as I haven't noticed the problem elsewhere.
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MR seems to work fine on my MB Air M1. Is there a particular place that MR stutters that I can try?
 
I've definitely noticed slightly choppy scrolling on this site as well as various others (with and without AdBlock Pro). This happened with my early 2020 air as well as this new M1. I hope an update improves this soon.
 
LED said:
I've definitely noticed slightly choppy scrolling on this site as well as various others (with and without AdBlock Pro). This happened with my early 2020 air as well as this new M1. I hope an update improves this soon.
Click to expand...
Have you tried different ad blockers? I don't notice any stuttering in Safari with Wipr enabled.
 
Super weird..

The 8c/8gb/512gb MBA M1 we have here in house is BUTTER smooth on Safari, and I've been testing it for days..

This is with many Extensions (two of which are AD/Privacy block related) running also.
 
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