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Apple must love choppy/stuttery/jittery visuals

N

no0nefamous

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 11, 2021
237
213
Something has bugged me ever since I took the plunge on an iMac...

$1900 M1 iMac - constant jitters, stutters, and animations played back at an ugly low framerate. Not intense animations, mind you, simple things like scrolling and window re-sizing. Constant sluggish input response and lag.

A ~$400 Windows 11 laptop - smooth, snappy visuals. Very responsive.

Tell me again why I paid premium prices for a budget experience? Sure, it looks cool and luxurious, but if it can't perform basic stuff smoothly when a budget device can, what's the point?

I have done a fresh install of macOS on my iMac and have run troubleshooting. Nothing is wrong with it it - it's just how Apple wants it to be, I guess.

iOS has also suffered from constant visual jitters and stutters for years, and the 120hz iPhones constantly throttle down the refresh rate resulting in an experience that is nowhere near as smooth as other higher refresh rate phones on the market.

So what's the deal here? Why does Apple, who is supposed to be all about a buttery smooth experience, keep their modern OS experiences so damn choppy? I was hoping for improved visuals on the M1 iMac with Ventura, but it still didn't happen. Buying an iMac is perhaps the most regrettable purchase I've ever made, knowing I could have built a good gaming rig for the same price.
 
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Quality has a trade off.

macOS‘s Quartz engine has a much higher quality compositor. It’s very smooth considering all the work going on. Super smooth on 120hz monitor.

iOS uses the same compositor.

The Windows 11 GUI looks advanced but look closely. It is just a skin on top of an old interface and has all these rough corners and rough fonts. Lots of the system apps haven’t changed since Windows XP. Right click on the Start menu and launch all the Admin tool. You will see the same apps and same interface from 20 years ago.
 
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purplerainpurplerain said:
The Windows 11 GUI looks advanced but look closely. It is just a skin on top of an old interface and has all these rough corners and rough fonts. Lots of the system apps haven’t changed since Windows XP. Right click on the Start menu and launch all the Admin tool. You will see the same apps and same interface from 20 years ago.
Click to expand...

Yeah but they look smooth whereas macOS looks like a budget experience on a nice screen.
 
MajorFubar said:
I only have to read this one sentence to realize you bought the wrong computer.
Click to expand...
Yeah. OP should have bought the Mac Studio for twice the price. They'd get the same experience, but could lord over everyone how much better a "modular" system is, especially when paired with a Studio Display, than an iMac.
 
Strange, I don’t get that feeling of stuttering with my M1 iMac, both in MacOS and Windows 11 (via Parallels) runs very smooth. I do have 16 GB of ram but otherwise just the mid tier iMac with 8 cores.
And I also use windows 10 on my Dell work laptop.

I actually don’t mind using Windows unlike many Apple fans (I love apple for the hardware and I think windows is actually superior in many ways to MacOS these days, even though MacOS looks nicer, it doesn’t always handle nicer) I do like iPadOS unlike many people.
 
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rpmurray said:
Yeah. OP should have bought the Mac Studio for twice the price. They'd get the same experience, but could lord over everyone how much better a "modular" system is, especially when paired with a Studio Display, than an iMac.
Click to expand...
Actually I was thinking they should have gone the PC route. When someone says "I could have bought a good gaming PC for the price of a Mac" that usually means gaming is important to them. I would never tell a gamer to buy a Mac.
 
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So many unknown variables here. I wish people would simply list the spec and what apps they are running at the point of the problem. Without those, it's just a one-sided rant that nobody can help, unless that's the actual intent.
 
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no0nefamous said:
Something has bugged me ever since I took the plunge on an iMac...

$1900 M1 iMac - constant jitters, stutters, and animations played back at an ugly low framerate. Not intense animations, mind you, simple things like scrolling and window re-sizing. Constant sluggish input response and lag.

A ~$400 Windows 11 laptop - smooth, snappy visuals. Very responsive.

Tell me again why I paid premium prices for a budget experience? Sure, it looks cool and luxurious, but if it can't perform basic stuff smoothly when a budget device can, what's the point?

I have done a fresh install of macOS on my iMac and have run troubleshooting. Nothing is wrong with it it - it's just how Apple wants it to be, I guess.

iOS has also suffered from constant visual jitters and stutters for years, and the 120hz iPhones constantly throttle down the refresh rate resulting in an experience that is nowhere near as smooth as other higher refresh rate phones on the market.

So what's the deal here? Why does Apple, who is supposed to be all about a buttery smooth experience, keep their modern OS experiences so damn choppy? I was hoping for improved visuals on the M1 iMac with Ventura, but it still didn't happen. Buying an iMac is perhaps the most regrettable purchase I've ever made, knowing I could have built a good gaming rig for the same price.
Click to expand...

From the bolded descriptions, I interpret that you have got a faulty machine.
Check again in the Activity monitor so see whether there are any applications consuming resources.
If not, it's clearly a faulty machine.
You can take it back to Apple Service Center and have it replaced or returned.
 
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