What's actually going on with tahoe bloat / lag?

[mackard]

Just wanted to share some results from living with tahoe for a week, and having some surprising success at, err improving it. Should admit im running an i9 16 inch macbook pro using a 5500m on an external 1440p display. So a very weak configuration. Also my definition of "useable" is a snappy machine, somewhere in the range of what it was like when i bought it. Not just a slow machine with "no compatibility problems and security fixes". I consider a downgraded machine as dysfunctional as an app not starting. Anyway..

Regarding the click lag, i found that switching out to a wired mouse, or a razer mouse with a usb dongle, removed a significant component of the general click lag that happens. It might in fact be bluetooth (again). One solid step towards useable from doing this.

Something tahoe is doing as well is it seems to be much more aggressive on lowering the gpu clock speeds on -both- normal and low power modes. Try this as a test.. go to some high res photos say and use quicklook preview. If its smooth dont worry, if its choppy, take note. Now put some mild load on the gpu (youtube video, screen saver preview etc) and try quicklook again. Note how its butter smooth. Interesting condition. So its positive for battery life given all the background bloat they would have added, but if this is also occuring on m1.. might be a clue into what's going on... how they achieved planned obsolescence at the same time as doing us a favor with a justified feature...

I was also mucking around with renice, increasing the priority of windowserver and lowering the priority of junk like logd and launchservicesd which are perpetually running and should be able to wait a few cycles without harm. Might have made a difference, but not much. This, and turning off so much stuff to list in system preferences, in the keyboard and spotlight sections in particular.

Anyway, hope this helps someone. There are many things i like about tahoe, more than any prior macos since monterey / ventura actually.. but at the same time, its not an invisible experience, there's still so much stuff where the OS is getting in between what you're doing in the brain and the actual activity on computer. Looking at dud ui or waiting for the genie to appear isn't productive, its a distraction.

 

[SDAVE]

Your first mistake is using Tahoe on Intel. There are numerous threads with negative feedback on Tahoe and Intel.

I suggest you downgrade to Sequoia if you are doing mission critical work...or get an M class MacBook Pro.

 

[kOoLiNuS]

Personally I have more issues with Tahoe on my 2 MacMini other than the MBP with i9 processor…

 

[Basic75]

Personally I have more issues with Tahoe on my 2 MacMini other than the MBP with i9 processor…

How much RAM do these two machines have respectively?

 

[SnowPenguin]

I haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet, and will only do it when I am forced to, but some people reported it was fine on their Intel Macs in general. It could be that it requires more RAM.

 

[mackard]

Your first mistake is using Tahoe on Intel. There are numerous threads with negative feedback on Tahoe and Intel.

I suggest you downgrade to Sequoia if you are doing mission critical work...or get an M class MacBook Pro.

Well, honestly tahoe has been the first macos that looked like its had new features for -me- since monterey, ie, graphical upgrades in the core os, the journal app, really like the ocd privacy warnings.. okay well that's more than most yearly versions.

In my experience, ventura is the last decent macos for intel, sonoma started the overbloat on intel and its just worse. Sure tahoe is even more bloated, but i suppose this is the first version where i get something in return to warrant trying to push through.

Yes i have a pristine ventura install on all my intel macs. I clean install once a quarter to compensate for running an out of date macos, just run one terminal command to copy what i need out of appdata and preferences and another terminal command to copy it back.. takes under an hour. Also the main reason for ventura is better power management and the clock app, otherwise monterey is fine. Anything further back and you lose universal control, which is amazing if you use it.

Just for reference i have 16 gigs of ram on my mbp.

 

[hieubui]

I haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet, and will only do it when I am forced to, but some people reported it was fine on their Intel Macs in general. It could be that it requires more RAM.

People keep saying it needs more RAM but please help me understand. How does RAM help with UI rendering performance?

 

[CMMChris]

Something tahoe is doing as well is it seems to be much more aggressive on lowering the gpu clock speeds on -both- normal and low power modes. Try this as a test.. go to some high res photos say and use quicklook preview. If its smooth dont worry, if its choppy, take note. Now put some mild load on the gpu (youtube video, screen saver preview etc) and try quicklook again. Note how its butter smooth. Interesting condition. So its positive for battery life given all the background bloat they would have added, but if this is also occuring on m1.. might be a clue into what's going on... how they achieved planned obsolescence at the same time as doing us a favor with a justified feature...

Has nothing to do with planned obsolescence. My M4 Max Mac Studio also suffers from choppy animations on quick look and some system dialog animations. I even went to an Apple Store to check: It's the same on all devices from base line MacBook Air up to the M2 Ultra Mac Pro and the latest M5 MacBook Pro.

 

[kOoLiNuS]

How much RAM do these two machines have respectively?

They have both 16GB

 

[macaddiict]

It seems to me there are some users who don't care or notice that their entire computer feels like it's being rendered through syrupy animations. Trying to move anything quickly or just fly through tasks in Tahoe is impossible thanks to the stuttering, gloopy animations and transitions everywhere. "Reduce" animation seems to barely make a difference, as the fades and replacement transitions are also slow as molasses.

 

[SDAVE]

Well, honestly tahoe has been the first macos that looked like its had new features for -me- since monterey, ie, graphical upgrades in the core os, the journal app, really like the ocd privacy warnings.. okay well that's more than most yearly versions.

In my experience, ventura is the last decent macos for intel, sonoma started the overbloat on intel and its just worse. Sure tahoe is even more bloated, but i suppose this is the first version where i get something in return to warrant trying to push through.

Yes i have a pristine ventura install on all my intel macs. I clean install once a quarter to compensate for running an out of date macos, just run one terminal command to copy what i need out of appdata and preferences and another terminal command to copy it back.. takes under an hour. Also the main reason for ventura is better power management and the clock app, otherwise monterey is fine. Anything further back and you lose universal control, which is amazing if you use it.

Just for reference i have 16 gigs of ram on my mbp.

Sequoia is pretty good for Intel.

Tahoe just feels new to you because of the UI updates, there isn't really any ground breaking features in there. A little trick Apple played on people.

 

[mackard]

Has nothing to do with planned obsolescence. My M4 Max Mac Studio also suffers from choppy animations on quick look and some system dialog animations. I even went to an Apple Store to check: It's the same on all devices from base line MacBook Air up to the M2 Ultra Mac Pro and the latest M5 MacBook Pro.

Clumsy planned obsolescence then. Sorry i assumed that the more modern m chips were able to manage themselves better. Yeah sounds like a team implementing the planned obsolescence wasn't required to communicate with the rest of the mac team. They did their job shrugged and moved on?

Sequoia is pretty good for Intel.

Tahoe just feels new to you because of the UI updates, there isn't really any ground breaking features in there. A little trick Apple played on people.

Eye candy is enough for me. Well i like the journal app, and that everything is asking permission to use the microphone now. Feels like windows 8. Honestly the transparent menubar is killer, its the reason why i just didn't reboot back into ventura.

 

[SDAVE]

Clumsy planned obsolescence then. Sorry i assumed that the more modern m chips were able to manage themselves better. Yeah sounds like a team implementing the planned obsolescence wasn't required to communicate with the rest of the mac team. They did their job shrugged and moved on?



Eye candy is enough for me. Well i like the journal app, and that everything is asking permission to use the microphone now. Feels like windows 8. Honestly the transparent menubar is killer, its the reason why i just didn't reboot back into ventura.

I don't hate Tahoe's new little features that make life easier, like new stuff in Messages (filtering) and a few others, they work well with my iPhone 17 Pro/iOS26, but to me, as a desktop device (specifically the Mac Pro in my signature) I can live without the latest and greatest its literally just a work machine that I am about to retire in 8-12 months.

Tahoe runs OK on my M class MacBooks, although personally I haven't "pushed" them hard enough to say if they are good for my workflow yet. I highly would advise AGAINST Tahoe at this point in time if you are doing production work.

 

[grammatica]

I installed Tahoe on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. It has 16 GB of RAM. Something about Tahoe is requiring more resources. I even factory reset my Mac and nothing changed.

 

[CMMChris]

Clumsy planned obsolescence then. Sorry i assumed that the more modern m chips were able to manage themselves better. Yeah sounds like a team implementing the planned obsolescence wasn't required to communicate with the rest of the mac team. They did their job shrugged and moved on?

It's simply bad software and Apple's attitude of "we don't care about issues until large media is covering them".

 

[Parowdy]

Has nothing to do with planned obsolescence. My M4 Max Mac Studio also suffers from choppy animations on quick look and some system dialog animations. I even went to an Apple Store to check: It's the same on all devices from base line MacBook Air up to the M2 Ultra Mac Pro and the latest M5 MacBook Pro.

All Mac’s are suffering right now it seems.
Thanks for actually going to check against in store units!
Personally I got an M1 Pro last year and loved how smooth everything is. Then Tahoe came out and now I’m feeling a little bit like I did on my 2017 i7 regarding animation fluidity.
Here is hoping anyOS 27 will finally bring order back into the experience.

 

[avkills]

I absolutely hate the nanny state of OSs these days. I don't install apps on my computer that I do not want being able to use the microphone, pick colors from the screen, use the camera. There ought to be a way to turn all that added security off. I get why they are doing it, but it is damn annoying for professionals.

 

[mackard]

It's simply bad software and Apple's attitude of "we don't care about issues until large media is covering them".

Yes. But at the same time, they've never gone back and changed the performance characteristics of a major version to work better with older hardware. Okay, maybe once, twice, on ios, decades ago.

 

[maxoakland]

Your first mistake is using Tahoe on Intel. There are numerous threads with negative feedback on Tahoe and Intel.

I suggest you downgrade to Sequoia if you are doing mission critical work...or get an M class MacBook Pro.

I had the same issue on iPadOS. I think it's the liquid glass

Also, people should be able to reliably use Apple's software on the computers they bought from them. It's not their fault Apple decided to switch from Intel and they shouldn't be punished for it

 

[SDAVE]

I had the same issue on iPadOS. I think it's the liquid glass

Also, people should be able to reliably use Apple's software on the computers they bought from them. It's not their fault Apple decided to switch from Intel and they shouldn't be punished for it

Apple doesn't care haha

 

[meggie_v]

Guys, just another data point: installing Tahoe on my 2025 MacBook Pro w/M4 Pro, I noticed the slowed performance right away. It wasn't a deal breaker--I still got my work done--but it was there and annoying. Even just basic web browsing in Safari involved a little extra hitch.

The M4 Pro is a fairly powerful processor, no? It's not the top of the line, but it's not the bottom. And the most taxing thing I do is RAW photo processing in Lightroom Classic--which, since it works with "Smart Preview" proxy files, amounts to slicing-and-dicing 4-ish megapixel bitmaps. Otherwise, I'm just browsing the web and slinging text in Sublime. My MacBook Pro should be SNAPY. It WAS under Sequoia. But with Tahoe? Doing my little non-intense things with it? STILL I noticed a performance tax.

Lag + shoddy look and feel of the "liquid glass" UI + no tangible benefits (no essential new features, etc) meant a trip back to Sequoia for me. And the snap is back! Noticed it right away, particularly with Safari.

I'm a regular reader of John Gruber's Daring Fireball. His coverage convinced me not to upgrade to Tahoe without having a bootable Sequoia installer at the ready--so I made one before I did the Tahoe "upgrade," and I'm glad I did.

I made another bootable installer, too--a different kind. Just for giggles. My MacBook Pro / M4 Pro was a replacement for a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro--a real trooper of a machine, for me. I've still got it. Just to see what's what, I threw System76's latest Pop_OS Debian Linux on it. I'm not a technical person. I don't know anything about anything. But making the bootable Linux installer was no more difficult than making the bootable MacOS installer. And You know what? The experience was enlightening. It works really well! SHOCKINGLY well. Installation was easy. Everything worked afterward. The computer's performative, too. Far snappier than it was under macOS Monterey, which was the last iteration it could take. Guys, that's an 11 year-old computer, running a free-open-source stack made by what amounts to a handful of volunteer software enthusiasts . . . and I could easily daily-drive it for work. Am I missing anything by using Libre Office instead of the new subscription version of "Numbers?" Um no. Would I be missing the latest tech? Hardly--its built-in web browser came out-of-the-box ready with agentic plugins and hooks for all the frontier AI services, which is more than you can say for macOS! Again, I was shocked. No, Pop_OS Linux isn't as finesseful as MacOS Sequoia. But MacOS Tahoe isn't as finesseful as MacOS Sequoia, either.

In this era of slick Apple pitch people blatantly lying about what Apple Intelligence / Siri will be able to do (yes, The North Remembers WWDC's '24's "demos") and marketing devices on the lie, then blatantly lying AGAIN a year later at WWDC '25's "where is the new Siri?" interview with the WSJ's Joanna Stern . . . and with Tim Cook busy enjoying his "Melania" movie dinner-date with his apparent good buddy Mike Tyson mere hours after a fateful, turning-point moment in Minneapolis . . . You bet I'm thinking about exits. That might sound political or whatever, but it's not. I'm not judging anyone else's choices; you do you out there. But I'm doing me.

The four-trillion-dollar company certainly doesn't need my business. Which might not be the best business-customer relationship for my needs, after all.

 

[SDAVE]

Guys, just another data point: installing Tahoe on my 2025 MacBook Pro w/M4 Pro, I noticed the slowed performance right away. It wasn't a deal breaker--I still got my work done--but it was there and annoying. Even just basic web browsing in Safari involved a little extra hitch.

The M4 Pro is a fairly powerful processor, no? It's not the top of the line, but it's not the bottom. And the most taxing thing I do is RAW photo processing in Lightroom Classic--which, since it works with "Smart Preview" proxy files, amounts to slicing-and-dicing 4-ish megapixel bitmaps. Otherwise, I'm just browsing the web and slinging text in Sublime. My MacBook Pro should be SNAPY. It WAS under Sequoia. But with Tahoe? Doing my little non-intense things with it? STILL I noticed a performance tax.

Lag + shoddy look and feel of the "liquid glass" UI + no tangible benefits (no essential new features, etc) meant a trip back to Sequoia for me. And the snap is back! Noticed it right away, particularly with Safari.

I'm a regular reader of John Gruber's Daring Fireball. His coverage convinced me not to upgrade to Tahoe without having a bootable Sequoia installer at the ready--so I made one before I did the Tahoe "upgrade," and I'm glad I did.

I made another bootable installer, too--a different kind. Just for giggles. My MacBook Pro / M4 Pro was a replacement for a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro--a real trooper of a machine, for me. I've still got it. Just to see what's what, I threw System76's latest Pop_OS Debian Linux on it. I'm not a technical person. I don't know anything about anything. But making the bootable Linux installer was no more difficult than making the bootable MacOS installer. And You know what? The experience was enlightening. It works really well! SHOCKINGLY well. Installation was easy. Everything worked afterward. The computer's performative, too. Far snappier than it was under macOS Monterey, which was the last iteration it could take. Guys, that's an 11 year-old computer, running a free-open-source stack made by what amounts to a handful of volunteer software enthusiasts . . . and I could easily daily-drive it for work. Am I missing anything by using Libre Office instead of the new subscription version of "Numbers?" Um no. Would I be missing the latest tech? Hardly--its built-in web browser came out-of-the-box ready with agentic plugins and hooks for all the frontier AI services, which is more than you can say for macOS! Again, I was shocked. No, Pop_OS Linux isn't as finesseful as MacOS Sequoia. But MacOS Tahoe isn't as finesseful as MacOS Sequoia, either.

In this era of slick Apple pitch people blatantly lying about what Apple Intelligence / Siri will be able to do (yes, The North Remembers WWDC's '24's "demos") and marketing devices on the lie, then blatantly lying AGAIN a year later at WWDC '25's "where is the new Siri?" interview with the WSJ's Joanna Stern . . . and with Tim Cook busy enjoying his "Melania" movie dinner-date with his apparent good buddy Mike Tyson mere hours after a fateful, turning-point moment in Minneapolis . . . You bet I'm thinking about exits. That might sound political or whatever, but it's not. I'm not judging anyone else's choices; you do you out there. But I'm doing me.

The four-trillion-dollar company certainly doesn't need my business. Which might not be the best business-customer relationship for my needs, after all.

Good news is Tahoe will get better on Apple Silicon. Better news is macOS 27 is supposed to be all performance enhancements (like Snow Leopard). If you can't wait for any of these updates, then downgrade to Sequoia or wait it out.

And yes M4 Pro is powerful, I have one here and it's faster in CPU performance to the M1 Max MacBook Pro (Altho the M1 Max has better GPU performance) I have as well.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I installed Tahoe on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. It has 16 GB of RAM. Something about Tahoe is requiring more resources. I even factory reset my Mac and nothing changed.

Do not be surprised. As time goes on computers are always "requiring more resources." We have hella more computing competence every year, so expect that to be "requiring more resources."

Especially more RAM. OS and apps have been evolving to need more RAM every year since starting at 128k ~40 years ago. A good thing, because RAM is a great way to compute; and Apple's UMA RAM is an even better way to compute. IMO 16 GB RAM is limiting once one gets beyond single-tasking [but the Mac OS will of course make about any level of RAM "work"].

 

[mackard]

Do not be surprised. As time goes on computers are always "requiring more resources." We have hella more computing competence every year, so expect that to be "requiring more resources."

Well that's exactly it. If one think's back to the apple experience.. the last time the machines got "faster" was pretty much the first or second generation of solid state drives they used. So around 2012? Think about it carefully, ever since that point, when you walk into an apple store to play around with the current generation models, they... all... feel... the... same...

The same instant snappiness as it has been for over a decade.

So how apple do their planned obsolescence is genius and legal? Because they develop their own chips in house, they are keenly aware how much extra performance they have which is sold every year. So all they have to do is tell their os team to consume that new performance every year. (And of course, the os needs to know how to get out of the way when the chips are put under load, but thats just a setting).

So works out peachy for everyone, apple can say they are doing new bloat stuff and call it features. Critically, the shiny new machines are just as fast as people expect when going into an apple store to see a "new" machine.

The only problem is with people with last years processors. They hit the update button under the bogey man of security updates (and apples forced rolling support policies i suppose)... and suddenly are running an os which adds bloat up to next years processor and is slower on your machine.

Nasty, nasty cycle.

See the difference at least for windows 10 was, yes everything evil in fact evil, updates are forced, but they never slowed down your machine. For how many years? Clearly its not a requirement to slow down your machine with updates.

 

[conmee]

Until I sold it a few weeks ago, I had a 2019 16" 2.4GHz 64GB 2TB 5500M 8GB VRAM and the stutters/lag were very apparent. Not snappy like Sequoia. Turning off transparency and reducing motion fixed pretty much all the UI lag/weirdness. But the lack of motion takes some getting used to, things just appear instead of swoop in (like notifications or Mission Control). I don't think it's a RAM amount issue as I had 64GB plus another 8GB VRAM (though more always helps), it's how ever the UI is being drawn. I also noticed that if the GPU was spun up doing some other moderate to intense work that it would generally clear up some of the animations (again, Mission Control for example). But icons would still take some time to populate in the Applications folder in finder or the App Launcher. But that just tells me that what Apple has done to make Tahoe look all fancy exceeds the 5500M's ability to render at idle speed (despite being able to render some games in excess of 100fps). In addition, I noticed that Tahoe animations also look much more smooth on a 120Hz monitor. Yeah, I know, it should look smooth. But I was surprised how janky Tahoe looks on the 16" display compared to my Dell 4K 165Hz display. But running the 4K display at that refresh rate also keeps the GPU working harder than for the built in 16" display, so that may play a part in all this as well.