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peterpan123

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 24, 2014
275
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Hello, I tried out a MacBook in an Apple Store. I like the size and the keyboard. However, when I launched Words, it took about 8-10 seconds to launch. I rebooted the machine and tried again. Same thing. How come it took so long to launch? Is this normal?
 
When you say 'Words', do you mean Word 2016 or Apple Pages? Or a different application?

Microsoft Words. I am not sure about the version. I also tried a few other applications installed on that demo machine. Launching of applications seemed slow.
 
Microsoft Words. I am not sure about the version. I also tried a few other applications installed on that demo machine. Launching of applications seemed slow.

Yeah the CPU isn't the quickest and the Flash isn't as quick as MBA/rMBP, but still it shouldn't be that slow. However there are a number of things that could cause slow performance, try restarting with 'reopen Windows when logging back in' disabled - heck the demo machine could even have a corrupted volume for all we know.

So really it shouldn't take 10 seconds for even Photoshop to open, let alone Word. What you described are 5400RPM speeds.
 
I think firing up an Office app is a great test to see how a computer is going to behave, its not the fastest app to fire up.

I found both the 24" and 27" iMac running off the 5400 rpm HD or 1TB Fusion drive (with 24GB of flash storage) to be exceedingly slow in starting up Excel and Word. They took a solid 18+ seconds to start up.

In the MacBook's case its not the storage that is the bottleneck but the CPU. Once its up and running how was the performance?
 
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Microsoft Words. I am not sure about the version. I also tried a few other applications installed on that demo machine. Launching of applications seemed slow.

MS Word (and no there is no such thing as "Words") is a notoriously slow app to start on any machine. If you combine that with rMB relatively slow CPU 6-8 second startup is not unexpected.
 
When I open Word on my rMB it bounces 5 times before it opens to the open documents page. Once open it is very responsive and fast. I'm using Office 2016 for Mac.
 
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Word 2011 on my rmb boots up virtually instantly as does Pages. His demo machine in the store was screwed up. when i was trying out the rmb in an Apple store initially scrolling through a news-heavy site was horribly slow, and actually had put me off on buying one. But the rmb I did buy, a base, scrolls through that same site like butter. Seems the demos in the stores are so overused and corrupted in many cases. Dont judge a rmb by a store demo.
 
Thanks for the comments. I shall try different rMB in different stores.

Do you think RAM does matter? On my rMBP 15", I have 16GB. Clicking on the Words icon almost instantly launched the application. After choosing Blank, the document was created almost instantly.
 
Word 2011 on my rmb boots up virtually instantly as does Pages. His demo machine in the store was screwed up. when i was trying out the rmb in an Apple store initially scrolling through a news-heavy site was horribly slow, and actually had put me off on buying one. But the rmb I did buy, a base, scrolls through that same site like butter. Seems the demos in the stores are so overused and corrupted in many cases. Dont judge a rmb by a store demo.
Word 2016 is different.

On my rMB Word 2016 takes about 5-6s to start. I would imagine that it should start faster on the Apple store demo, since it is an optimized system. Once started, it's fast and responsive, even for very large documents.

But Word is generally a slow program to start. On my iMac with a super fast CPU but an old spinning HD, it takes 1min to start! That drives my crazy.
 
Word and all of the 2016 Office apps are notoriously slow to start. This is true on both my '15 rMB and on my '13 Mac Pro. Office 2011 apps started much, much more quickly on both systems.
 
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I run Office 2011 (not Outlook) on my 1.2 Retina MacBook with no issue, from a cold start App`s will always be a little slower, once cached it`s virtually instantaneous. It`s not like anyone will be rebooting between sessions of Office. When you reboot OS X there is a lot going on, this can and will exasperate the perceived delay in MS Office Apps opening.

Q-6
 
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Word 2016 opens in 3.5 seconds on my 1.2/512. Once open there is zero lag or issues.

Update: tried a few more times. 3.5 was an anomaly. Looks more like 4-5 depending on I don't know what. Oh well. Still runs great.
 
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Office seems to open slower and slower with every iteration. If it opens fast for you, it's probably because you haven't updated to the latest version yet and you have a bit of a hardware advantage.

It takes almost exactly as long to open the latest version of Word on my Surface Pro 3 as it does to open the latest version on my Macbook.
 
Word and all of the 2016 Office apps are notoriously slow to start. This is true on both my '15 rMB and on my '13 Mac Pro. Office 2011 apps started much, much more quickly on both systems.
I'm using office 2011 and it opened instantly, it's definitely the version!

I'm using a 1.1 RMB
 
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