MP 7,1 Tahoe on 7,1 is intentionally set up as "Planned Obsolescence"

[Hajj.david]

I've been a Mac user for over 20 years and never believed this, but now I am beginning to realize this is true.

On a $25,000 (used to be) Mac Pro, 26.2 Tahoe runs like trash. Mind you, this is a production machine.

It runs like a Pentium 4, really boggles my mind that Apple would go this far to make Tahoe useless.

I will be downgrading to Sequoia after backing up my files.

I've never seen any version of macOS run like this, especially on a high end and VERY capable machine like this. I literally cannot get any work done in Adobe suite. Constant stuttering, beachballs, you name it.

When did you upgrade, it can take a day or two for indexing to finish which will slow down your computer significantly. Especially with what you described (high RAM usage) it usually a strong sign of indexing and optimization. Give it a few days and see if it returns to normal.

 

[rappr]

Well your post is humorously uninformed. Apple has nothing to gain from ‘planned obsolescence’ as you call it?

If that is what Apple is doing - as you claim - then there would be heaps to gain - forcing people to upgrade to maintain performance for one…

I know its different for anyone nerdy enough to post on MacRumors, but when most normal people have a negative experience with a product, they switch to different vendor.

 

[Marvin_nz]

Honestly, it cracks me up how often people jump on here to have a full meltdown because one of the biggest companies on the planet did something they personally don’t like. Like… mate, it’s a trillion‑dollar corporation, not your flatmate forgetting to do the dishes.

If you don’t like what Big Company A is doing, cool... there’s always Big Company B, C, D, or the classic option: roll up your sleeves, start your own empire, and show them how it’s really done. Competition is healthy, and nobody’s forcing anyone to stay loyal to a brand like it’s a long‑term relationship.

At the end of the day, vote with your wallet, not your tears, and forum posts to grab attention ( your 15mins of fame )

 

[neuropsychguy]

There's plenty 2019 MP 7,1 users here stating the same thing. I'm not some n00b here, I'm a professional using a workstation level hardware that Apple sold for $25,000 in 2019 and continues to support it to this day. Do you really think I would randomly post this without having any talking points? I'm not an "influencer". I'm a Creative Director who does a ton of work with high end brands.

In every post like these, over the years, I always see Apple apologists (I will say I am one of those people sometimes too).

It's not just Adobe related, even on idle RAM usage is 40-50GB for no reason whatsoever. Sequoia ran perfectly fine. You're telling me 1 OS version bump and some liquid glass effects slowed down my system that has 28 cores and 192GB of RAM by 60%?

Do you only have the big slowdowns with Adobe software or is it system-wide?

Did you see a huge drop in how long it takes to render or edit something or are the slowdowns with the UI?

With the higher RAM usage do you also have higher memory pressure?

I know it's a headache and you said you're going to downgrade versions but do you have the capability of doing a fresh install?

 

[-BigMac-]

I know its different for anyone nerdy enough to post on MacRumors, but when most normal people have a negative experience with a product, they switch to different vendor.

100%. I think some people rather complain about it, rather than changing vendors - which is what i was addressing with my comment

 

[SDAVE]

OP, sorry you've had such a frustrating experience. Have you considered rolling back to Sequoia for the time being? Also what about installing a fresh Tahoe OS on a second partition? May be a good way to troubleshoot.

Going to do Sequia this weekend, it will take time as I have too many plugins/customizations. There's no point in doing a fresh install of Tahoe it's a waste of time.

I doubt Apple is purposely making Tahoe bad for Intel-based Macs, but they sure aren't giving it much effort to optimize. Starting with Monterey, Apple started including Apple Silicon-only features. That was the real beginning of the end. I am not really surprised or upset to be honest. I'll have got 8 years of OS upgrades/support for my 2019 when I retire my Intel MBP in 2027 (9 years if they somehow make Tahoe run smoothly and I get to 2028). Not bad at all as far as I'm concerned. I actually thought Sonoma or Sequoia would have been the end of the road for Intel Macs, so to get Tahoe (even though it isn't all that great) for Intel Macs was a bit of a surprise.

They can "deprioritize" Intel since it's the last OS it will be supported on, that means no performance enhancements and "letting it go" and to the normal consumer, it will seem that their computer is old and they need to upgrade. Do you really think this is below Apple to do to deprioritize Intel at this point?

When did you upgrade, it can take a day or two for indexing to finish which will slow down your computer significantly. Especially with what you described (high RAM usage) it usually a strong sign of indexing and optimization. Give it a few days and see if it returns to normal.

Yeah I'm aware, I upgraded to 26 a long time ago and .2 more than a week ago. It's definitely not Spotlight index related.

Honestly, it cracks me up how often people jump on here to have a full meltdown because one of the biggest companies on the planet did something they personally don’t like. Like… mate, it’s a trillion‑dollar corporation, not your flatmate forgetting to do the dishes.

If you don’t like what Big Company A is doing, cool... there’s always Big Company B, C, D, or the classic option: roll up your sleeves, start your own empire, and show them how it’s really done. Competition is healthy, and nobody’s forcing anyone to stay loyal to a brand like it’s a long‑term relationship.

At the end of the day, vote with your wallet, not your tears, and forum posts to grab attention ( your 15mins of fame )

Oh yeah dude, there's definitely another computer that runs macOS

Let's vote with our wallet.

Do you only have the big slowdowns with Adobe software or is it system-wide?

Did you see a huge drop in how long it takes to render or edit something or are the slowdowns with the UI?

With the higher RAM usage do you also have higher memory pressure?

I know it's a headache and you said you're going to downgrade versions but do you have the capability of doing a fresh install?

It's system wide. I completely turned of Liquid Glass as much as I can, so that helped a bit. But even on idle without any software open, there's high spikes in RAM usage and CPU usage is low. There's also high spikes in GPU usage randomly.

In Photoshop and AfterEffects and Premiere, there's huge slow downs, when hitting the playback, the cursor stutters, in AE theres constant slowdowns during previews, audio stuttering. When I do anything in Photoshop, its slow consistently, operations take longer, and even simple things like having Chrome and Apple Music/Spotify playing in the back, the music stutters and PS lags.

If I dont use Adobe software, I'm mainly doing work in Chrome and Slack and both run horribly.

I can do a fresh Tahoe install with a USB stick and restore from Time Machine, but I doubt that will help.

My plan is to go back to Sequoia, but it's going to take me so many hours to completely do a fresh install with so many plugins/software/utilities and files to move. I just shouldn't have pulled the trigger on Tahoe, I had a feeling in my gut it was going to be horrible (reminds me of Leopard's performance on the last gen G5's).

 

[MallardDuck]

I’d argue that a near 7 year old machine with a legacy architecture is obsolete. It’s been clear that maintaining Intel compatibility hasn’t been a priority since the M1 came out. Frankly I’m surprised that they even had support for it in Tahoe - I’d guessed 2025 was the cutoff (only missed that by a year).

I know that’s tough given your investment, but the platform shift has made massive gains in performance, though at the expense of being able to use real graphics cards.

 

[MallardDuck]

My 2019 i9 MacBook Pro runs like trash on sequoia. I don’t think it’s intentional, just zero effort put into x86 hardware. I hang on to it for virtualising windows, but my M4 mini runs windows on arm VMs with x86 windows apps almost as well so I think I’ll get a M5 pro Arm MacBook to replace it soon. Windows on arm used to be rubbish when it came to the x86 apps I run, but now they work pretty well.

Yep, the win11 “rosetta” is pretty good. Then only thing that’s a real problem is older software that doesn’t run on 11.

And of course, win11 is becoming the poster child for ******tification.

 

[SDAVE]

I’d argue that a near 7 year old machine with a legacy architecture is obsolete. It’s been clear that maintaining Intel compatibility hasn’t been a priority since the M1 came out. Frankly I’m surprised that they even had support for it in Tahoe - I’d guessed 2025 was the cutoff (only missed that by a year).

I know that’s tough given your investment, but the platform shift has made massive gains in performance, though at the expense of being able to use real graphics cards.

Dude they were still selling these into 2021/2022 wym its a 7 year old machine lol

Also a 28 core Intel Xeon is not an old CPU. Neither is 2933Mhz RAM.

There's nothing obsolete about the 7,1 2019 MP, especially the 12, 16,28 core versions

Runs perfectly fine in Sequoia and Windows (which I don't use besides for gaming).

So, yes, to me, this is planned obsolescence.

My M1 Max works fine. In multi core, the MP is still faster. The GPU in MP is still faster than anything Apple has to offer (and its a 3-4 year old GPU).

There's NOTHING in Tahoe (except dumb Liquid Glass UI updates) that garners a 40-60% performance drop compared to the previous version of macOS (1 year difference).

Stop making excuses for Apple's terrible decisions on professional hardware. This machine has made me lots of money and then some so I am not mad at it, but it's hilarious to see that a 1 year old OS update literally nukes this hardware, which is still perfectly fine.

 

[loby]

Tahoe running terribly on my M1 Max 16” MBP and that’s with 64GB RAM 😱 Not cool.

Yes, WHY all of a sudden switching from macOS Sequoia to Tahoe causes these issues, not JUST new OS interface bugs or typical glitches with a 'new' OS..???

I keep downgrading back to macOS Sequoia. "I want to like macOS Tahoe...Really."

Example: The M "1" was a power house before. I have 30-Core GPU and work with video. Performance is noticeably different to the slower with macOS Tahoe. Graphic glitches...WHY? Just because LG transparent court jester bubbly movements to be FUN for the kids???? acting like drunken sailor (pun) when opening up something??? Is that the target market Apple is looking at? They can't buy anything unless their parents give them Money. They don't have jobs? Don't you think you would cater to those who make the money to spend? "?" Yes, they are the future, but they can't buy now.

Five years after...Like clock work. Issues with the M1. So the mentality is after 3-4 years, stay on the OS or buy another expensive Mac. And if you don't like it..go to Microsoft or Linux????

I don't believe in plan obsolescence...but..

what I see is the pattern over the years that Apple does not "care" about systems after they stop selling it (but that is also questionable at times i.e cMP while they still sold it). I got hit with that. though I "liked it", Apple just ignored the issues hoping people would forget it. Understandable...you are in business to make money...that is it. I get it. But no responsibility for your products? If you don't like it leave?? Come on..

THEN...after the cMP...the Mac Pro 2019 came out and Apple promised a new philosophy about adding modular components and gave the impression that they would start to go that direction. Did they? NO...no add-ons. Glad I saw that nonsense they were spewing out at the time when watching the keynote. They put out the iMac Pro just to look like they cared...and then they dumped that too.

Especially with Professionals, they should have learned with Final Cut Pro transition from Final Cut 7. Though I liked and preferred the future prospective, there were plenty of professionals that lost A LOT of functionality in the software until FCP added back many of the features years later that they were still developing and not present in the "new" version. Many left Apple all-together and went to Microsoft or now using Adobe. NEVER CAME BACK. Looks like they did not care, and still don't.

Though sales numbers might NOT be as high as quantity toy iPhone sales, one $25,000 Mac could be roughly 25 sales of iPhones at ($1,000) a pop.

How long is Apple required to service their products? I prefer "self-management", but Apple does not do anything until they have too with some law suit etc. I don't like big gov getting into the details, but come on Apple.

Let's take a breather and think about things before "just" do something for the heck of it like LG. There was no need for it. It has caused more problems then for the "fun" or the "laugh"..

You might laugh yourself out of certain markets Apple...let's think first before always listening to your marketing department fresh out of college.

Ok..I am done.

 

[MallardDuck]

Dude they were still selling these into 2021/2022 wym its a 7 year old machine lol

Also a 28 core Intel Xeon is not an old CPU. Neither is 2933Mhz RAM.

There's nothing obsolete about the 7,1 2019 MP, especially the 12, 16,28 core versions

Runs perfectly fine in Sequoia and Windows (which I don't use besides for gaming).

So, yes, to me, this is planned obsolescence.

There's NOTHING in Tahoe (except dumb Liquid Glass UI updates) that garners a 40-60% performance drop compared to the previous version of macOS (1 year difference).

FWIW, I agree on the Liquid Glass. The first thing I did was turn off transparency and disable as much of that crap as I could - it’s worse than useless eye candy…it actively makes things harder to see, for absolutely no gain.

If you want to say that the move to apple silicon planned to make intel machines obsolete, yep, that’s true, and that hasn’t been a surprise for about 5 years now (from the day it was announced). From a MacOS standpoint, it’ll be obsolete next year. I would guess it can’t run the latest win11 either (that’s a guess, I haven’t looked) because it lacks the required trusted compute features. There’s a ton of Win10 machines in that boat…that are still perfectly good for what those folks use them for, but they can’t run win11, and thus can’t get security patches.

I suspect that the extent of the intel development effort in Tahoe was simply to make it run, with no investment in optimization. So you’re stuck between an OS that will lose security fixes sooner, or one that loses them later. And that sucks for sure. It will have a great future if you migrate to Linux, but for MacOS, within a couple of years it’s end of life unfortunately.

What sucks the most is that Apple has yet to release a machine that’s remotely as ‘pro’ as yours (I only consider it pro if you can actually use real graphics cards), so they’re walking away from the high-end creative market.

 

[Dolphins1972]

For me it's been system wide. My 2019 Intel MP has been beach-balling even when just opening files, it seems like it's indexing every time I open a file? This all started when I installed Tahoe, I did not have these issues with Sequoia. When running design software or image/video editors I can see sometimes the VRAM does not release even when closing the software. I can see this happening with iStat Menus. At first I wasn't sure what was happening but EtreCheck reported below average results: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2019-mp-7-1-tahoe-performance-issues.2468234/ Since updating to 26.2 nothing has improved.

I wasn't sure it OS related at the time of posting the above thread but I'm sure of it now, Tahoe is crap and it has crippled my MP 7,1.

 

[loby]

I know its different for anyone nerdy enough to post on MacRumors, but when most normal people have a negative experience with a product, they switch to different vendor.

Some have too much invested in a tech architecture to "just" switch vendors. Though a true comment, you are probably referring to "normal people" as iPhone or iPad users. LG is "ok" for "normal" users, but if you use your tech for other than "fun" stuff, then you may see why all of the complaints.