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Thinking of returning M1 Macbook Air

J

JHPDF

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 7, 2022
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I know this will sound like a clickbaity complaint post, but I'm genuinely looking for advice.

I bought a M1 MacBook air in December to replace my 2012 MBA. The old one was a great machine (2GHz i7, 8GB ram) but the hinge was loose, the battery lasted an hour, the trackpad was so dirty it only registered clicks on the right hand side and I'd filled up it's 256GB SSD.

The new machine is cool and silent and the the battery life is beautiful but... it's just not faster. Application switching is sluggish, when I get a phone call and FaceTime opens up the machine is unusable for the 20 seconds it take to work out what's going on. With a normal number of tabs open (20-30, a lot of Google Docs) if just feels slower. Safari pages sometimes just freeze (can't click or scroll) and have to be reloaded.

I thought this would just be my imagination, and that if I went back to the old one the difference would be noticeable, but I'm on the old machine now and if anything it feels faster. I'm sure I could encode videos faster on the M1, but that's not what I do all day. I just ran GeekBench on both, obviously the M1 was faster, but the app beachballed for 3secs when I opened it on the M1 and not on the intel. Nothing on the M1 feels 2 or 5 or 10 times faster.

I'm really considering returning the M1 and just getting the old machine cleaned up (inside and out) and the battery replaced (thought the battery was never great because of the i7). Am I doing something wrong with the M1. Everything's up-to-date and hardly anything is running through rosetta.

Thanks for reading
 
That would probably be a good idea if you’re unsatisfied. I would say you have two options:

1. Get your old laptop refurbed (maybe get a larger disk and clone the old one for more space), or

2. Buy a faster computer (if you want an apple silicon mac, I recommend the new MacBook Pros if you can affford them, they’re quite snappy)
 
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Did you perchance update the MBA to Monterey? In that case, you should try reverting to Big Sur. My M1 MBA is still on Big Sur 11.6.2 and I intend to keep it that way until Monterey includes Universal Control, and memory leaks are fixed. One more thing, and this is a silly thing to mention, but certain websites use an inordinate amount of CPU in safari, and macrumors happens to be one of them. There's a topic about it, in fact, so til that's fixed, don't view this site in safari. I'm typing this in Opera as a matter of fact.

I'd be remiss not to mention that my MBA is 16gb/1tb, but I can tell you it's much faster than the 2015 16gb MacBook Pro it replaced. I have about a dozen apps running most of the time, including 3 browsers, and each browser has 10 or more windows, with the windows having on average 5 or more open tabs, and a couple of the apps, like skype and vs code, are known to consume resources, but whenever I force all that to restart by logging out & logging back in, it takes under a minute for everything to reload. I'm sure the new MacBook Pros are even faster, but I can't remember the last time I saw a beachball
 
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Something seems to be slowing down your computer, these beachballs don't seem
MacNerd01 said:
That would probably be a good idea if you’re unsatisfied. I would say you have two options:

1. Get your old laptop refurbed (maybe get a larger disk and clone the old one for more space), or

2. Buy a faster computer (if you want an apple silicon mac, I recommend the new MacBook Pros if you can affford them, they’re quite snappy)
Click to expand...

An M1 Pro/M1 Max Mac is not that faster in everyday tasks than an M1 Air. They use the same efficiency and performance cores (they just have more performance ones) and that shouldn't influence what OP is describing - meaning: for opening FaceTime, a fully specced M1 Max MBP should be roughly the same as an M1 Air.

OP, it seems something is not ok with your computer, not sure what could be the case but you definitely shouldn't be seeing beachballs for what you describe. The M1 Air should be able to handle these things smoothly.
 
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Suggest use Activity Monitor to see what is going on with CPU and Memory. There may be some culprit hogging CPU or RAM, which will help point to you to understanding the issue. Otherwise you are just going by feelings.
It should definitely, no question, feel much snappier than a 2012 MBA.
Make sure you have a good internet connection speed. Do an internet speed test. Some people have had faulty wifi module
 
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I bought a 2020 M1 Air to replace the 2012 11” MBA my wife was using, and she couldn’t stop gushing over how much better the new laptop was for over a week. There must be something going on with your new computer.

Edit: The M1 Air is running 11.6.2, not Monterey, so that is a difference.
 
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Romain_H said:
I agree with @aevan. Your computer‘s behavior does not seem normal. I wouldn‘t return it, but ask for a replacement or at least fix
Click to expand...
Except that it will be useless replacing if it is a software, not hardware, issue. Hence my suggestion above to use Activity Monitor etc. to try and better understand the cause.

There is also the option to try Apple support. I have found them very responsive.
 
If your new Air isn’t faster than a 2012 model, there is something significantly wrong. They’re MASSIVELY faster.

Assuming the software fixes people have mentioned don’t work, I would definitely recommend returning it, but for a replacement, not to go back to the old machine.
 
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Something is either wrong with the hardware or the software. I’d recommend a clean install of Monterey. Something isn’t right there. Mine is blazing fast at literally everything.

If that doesn’t work, contact Apple.
 
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At this point, I would return the M1 MacBook Air and wait for the new MacBook Air which will be introduced in April, 2022 :)

0295AECC-6348-477B-8D37-00E636209F3F.jpeg
 
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I can attest that my GF's MBP M1 Max with Monterey commonly consumes 10+GB of ram on control center.
Not sure what's up with Monterey
 
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Not sure how you performed the setup, i.e. from a backup or not. If the former, I would suggest resetting to factory, and setting up as new, WITHOUT using a backup/migration wizard. Then use it for a day or two, to see how it performs.

Based on the results of that, you can decide how to proceed, i.e. return for a refund, upgrade to something else, etcetera...
 
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macsound1 said:
I can attest that my GF's MBP M1 Max with Monterey commonly consumes 10+GB of ram on control center.
Not sure what's up with Monterey
Click to expand...
It's less stable than beta software, that's what's up with it. Apple's new software strategy is to throw a bunch of new features at the wall and see what sticks, and fix major bugs along the way. It is so annoying and so un-Apple.
 
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My opinion: There *MAY BE* a hardware problem with your new Mac M1 machine, and it should be returned. I brought a M1 Air 512 GB/ 8GB to replace my 2015 Air, and I see very little beachballs, and the only time I see it is when I'm expecting to see it (doing OCR in Windows 11 ARM emulating a Windows 7 64-bit program :O )

If you did a restore from your older machine to the new machine, I suggest reformatting the computer and copying the files over.
 
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I agree with several other members that there's a problem with your M1 Air. I own one, and it feels faster than the 2020 Intel machine it replaced.

Maybe migration assistant copied over your X86 apps directly instead of sourcing ARM versions? Try checking them.
 
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I got an M1 MBA 8/256 to be a mobile companion to my 2019 16" MBP i9/16/1T, and laptop to laptop, the M1 is visibly snappier across the board. There are some areas where the i9 MBP is overall a better performer, it's most noticeable hooked up to my 5K LG monitor, where the total pixel count is just a big load for the graphics of the MBA.

But the things you're talking about are ALL considerably faster on the M1 MBA. Enough that I traded in my i9 MBP for an M1 Pro 16" MBP at a significant loss, I really badly wanted the general speedy feeling I got with the MBA.

Whether it's somehow not accessing the Apple Silicon specific version of various software, or it's having memory issues, something isn't working as it's supposed to.

I'd start with intel-native software, and go from there, with an actual problem with your hardware a long way down the list.

Step one, create a new fresh admin user, go see how it performs with ONLY the new clean user logged in. If it's fast and slick, start looking at software and utilities you use. If it's slow right out of the gate with a new user, focus on add-on software that launches on startup, and then the OS itself.
 
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