M1 Mac performance (Tahoe)

[mackard]

One thing i learned from the ios7 (i think) days is that transparencies are very computationally expensive. I've seen on my intel mac using the intel gpu in non retina mode (as that's the only thing an intel mac can afford) is that window server goes from 20% - 40% depending on whether the dock and menubar are visible or hidden. Its worth hiding those to see if that's making any difference.

Also do you have something moving BEHIND the menubar and dock? That's what does it for me.

If i'm going to use this version long term, at minimum its transparencies only as a desktop / plugged in. If its mobile definitely need to turn off the transparencies.

EDIT: having said, the m1 should have no trouble with a transparent dock and menu bar, even though you wouldn't want them on for battery life.

Also having said, apple are TRYING to obsolete their macs. Even if they kept macos without any bloat for eternity, when a calendar date hits the hardware goes on the vintage and obsolete list so i dont think optimisation and compatibility is their first priority.

 

[Retroworldnews]

Perhaps a quick run in Safe Mode and then reboot in normal mode can clean up the OS and flush out and refresh the system.

"
What is Safe Mode?

Starting up your Mac in safe mode can help you determine whether an issue you're experiencing is caused by the software that loads every time your Mac starts up. It does this by preventing your Mac from loading things like login items, non-system fonts, and system extensions, and performing a First Aid check on your startup disk. It also deletes certain caches, including the kernel cache, which are recreated on the fly when needed."

Same. I happen go Safari try scroll. It do sense more better than using Chrome. I noticed now if you use trackpad doing two fingers gesture to the left or right. I will not , is like need to hold a bit to see the arrow on chrome browser than it works. Sorry Is hard to explain here. If you don't get it. Nevertheless i feel this new Mac OS still have quite a lot bugs to settle likewise thus others apps etc also will need to update once Mac OS come out the first bugs fix.

 

[loby]

One thing i learned from the ios7 (i think) days is that transparencies are very computationally expensive. I've seen on my intel mac using the intel gpu in non retina mode (as that's the only thing an intel mac can afford) is that window server goes from 20% - 40% depending on whether the dock and menubar are visible or hidden. Its worth hiding those to see if that's making any difference.

Also do you have something moving BEHIND the menubar and dock? That's what does it for me.

If i'm going to use this version long term, at minimum its transparencies only as a desktop / plugged in. If its mobile definitely need to turn off the transparencies.

EDIT: having said, the m1 should have no trouble with a transparent dock and menu bar, even though you wouldn't want them on for battery life.

Also having said, apple are TRYING to obsolete their macs. Even if they kept macos without any bloat for eternity, when a calendar date hits the hardware goes on the vintage and obsolete list so i dont think optimisation and compatibility is their first priority.

Yes, I don't want to say the M1 is "too good" so Apple does something to make people buy...as I "could" accuse them off doing (probably justified)...as I have seen over the years and experienced some "questionable things". but I believe you are correct...

Apple will have to do something to bloat their M1's so people will buy after vintage and obsolete schedules since their mac are not intel anymore and are good enough for most currently.

For once in my long Apple ecosystem mac life, I would only update because "I want too" instead of need. Of course I have been "trained" by Apple to update as I always like the new and latest, but for need..this is the first time I could wait some. I cannot tell my wife that of course. 😂

I do not like the "cartoon" type reactions with ios26 and macOS26, but believe they are cleaning up their code to make it "M-series" only and lessening the intel architecture, so we should see faster and smoother OS's (in theory) in the future regardless of what M-series version you have.

Currently, though there are glitches using M1 over my M3, macOS Tahoe is generally faster (which is what drives me to continue with Apple).

 

[Kallumlavigne]

I have the m1 iMac has anyone else's got warm after this update? and can hear the fans

 

[thebart]

I have the m1 iMac has anyone else's got warm after this update? and can hear the fans

My M1 mini is sometimes laggy. Things take a beat too long to open and populate. Beach balls in places. But it's never gotten hot enough for the fan to be audible.

Can you check activity monitor?

 

[Kallumlavigne]

My M1 mini is sometimes laggy. Things take a beat too long to open and populate. Beach balls in places. But it's never gotten hot enough for the fan to be audible.

Can you check activity monitor?

think I'm gonna try a fresh install since I updated to it

 

[thebart]

think I'm gonna try a fresh install since I updated to itView attachment 2557427

What's using your CPU GPU when the fan kicks up

 

[Kallumlavigne]

What's using your CPU GPU when the fan kicks up

probably too much for it, but shouldn't be I was using photoshop safari & apple music

 

[zkap]

MacBook Pro, M1, 8GB. Tahoe works very well and I really like the new UI.
Of course there is a bug or a stutter here or there (like when dragging a file from a folder into an e-mail, there is a two-second freeze, but then it's all good again), but minor things that don't impact my usage at all. I'm impressed with the performance on my M1 MBP with the lowest RAM count, and it's early days still. Very nice. It's shaping up to be my favorite software so far.

 

[loby]

Has anyone seen a difference between doing a fresh install and just upgrading?

I did notice that I did a fresh install on my 16" M1 MacBook Pro, but did an upgrade on my M3 Air. What I noticed is that Adobe Elements 2024 on the fresh install M1 MacBook Pro errored a little, while the upgraded M3 Air had no issues. Maybe since it was already installed. Adobe Elements 2024 uses Rosetta to install.

Has anyone did a test to see if there is a difference overall with performance, graphical stuttering etc.when doing a fresh install vs. jut an upgrade ???

I might reinstall macOS Sequoia (everything worked well) and do an upgrade instead and see...

 

[FNH15]

Installed 26.1 on a spare M1 MacBook. Performance is much better and many of the visual bugs have been addressed. Should've been the shipping release honestly. I can't update my primary machine as I cannot afford to have a beta bug pop up right now. But I assume it will be the same on my M1 Pro.

 

[mabaker]

Installed 26.1 on a spare M1 MacBook. Performance is much better and many of the visual bugs have been addressed. Should've been the shipping release honestly. I can't update my primary machine as I cannot afford to have a beta bug pop up right now. But I assume it will be the same on my M1 Pro.

Thank you for reporting back from the field. Nice to know they are working on improving things.

 

[vopoj]

I installed 26.1, on my M1 Pro. Have some improvement in animation speed compared to 26.0. The Quick Look feature is still choppy. But it not as good as Sequoia

 

[cpnotebook80]

its sluggish a bit on the base m1 macbook pro. I did not update my m2 max 16" as its fine as is. will wait for further updates down the road and then update.

 

[loby]

Went back to macOS Sequoia on my 16" M1 MacBook Pro 32GB RAM with 2TB SSD. Kept macOS Tahoe on my m3 MacBook Air 24GB RAM with 2TB SSD to see how things go.

Will wait it out on the M1 for further updates. I see both sluggish and fast on some programs, but overall this is first launch in years that was buggy enough for me to revert back. "yes" there is always bugs on the first launch, but Tahoe's initial launch probably needed more time in the oven to cook.

 

[Pudlo]

Has anyone with M1 machine (MBP/MBA/iMac) updated to Tahoe?

My M1 iMac has been updated to Tahoe. I found that the common dialogue (pop-up) box's animation is very jittery (Framerate drops to around 30fps). Quick Preview is stuttering, not smooth at all. Besides, Adobe AI, ID performance are bad, extremely stuttering during panning and zooming objects.

Are these issues existing in high-end machines such as M2-M4, Pro/Max, etc...?

However the Magic Mouse scrolling behavior is excellent and Safari is much snappier than previous versions. The new UI is too beautiful.

for me mbp m1, tahoe is the smoothest, much better then Sequoia, the whole time (with couple of Sequoisa installation) I had some fluidity loss (16gb) when I opened couple of windows, that was the same with Tahoe beta, but full Tahoe installed as a fresh install is crazy fluid and smooth

 

[jonidontcry]

just updated on my MBP M1 14"; more lagging than ever; web scrolling is not smoothly at all; many apps don't work;
should I downgrade it to Ventura? or wait for further updates from ?

 

[jonidontcry]

If I rollback from Tahoe, what should be the best OS version for my Macbook Pro M1 14" (16GB/512GB)?
- Ventura? (13)
- Sonoma? (14)
- Sequoia? (15)
Love hear your advice.

 

[maflynn]

Sequoia? (15)

If you want the most features, go Sequoia, if you want the most stable, maybe Sonoma

I'm on Sequoia and its been fine, but I think an argument could be made to go back further.

That said, you have issues with going backwards. First you can only downgrade to the version of macOS that was originally installed. So if you got a Mac with Sequoia, then you will not be able to install Sonoma. Secondly, is the availability of the installers. I beleive you can still download macOS 15 from apple, but not the others. You'll have to find an installer on the interwebs and that presents its own set of risks

 

[jonidontcry]

If you want the most features, go Sequoia, if you want the most stable, maybe Sonoma

I'm on Sequoia and its been fine, but I think an argument could be made to go back further.

That said, you have issues with going backwards. First you can only downgrade to the version of macOS that was originally installed. So if you got a Mac with Sequoia, then you will not be able to install Sonoma. Secondly, is the availability of the installers. I beleive you can still download macOS 15 from apple, but not the others. You'll have to find an installer on the interwebs and that presents its own set of risks

Thanks a lot. I may try to find Sonoma first.

 

[loby]

If I rollback from Tahoe, what should be the best OS version for my Macbook Pro M1 14" (16GB/512GB)?
- Ventura? (13)
- Sonoma? (14)
- Sequoia? (15)
Love hear your advice.

Depending on your software, Ventura or Sequoia with an M1. From my experience and I rolled back and duel boot to these.

 

[Grumpus]

I beleive you can still download macOS 15 from apple, but not the others.

Installers going all the way back to Lion are available from Apple, download links for various installers are provided on the Mr. Macintosh blog, and if you're running Monterey or newer you can use Mist. This is not an exhaustive list. All of these download directly from Apple's servers.

 

[maflynn]

Installers going all the way back to Lion are available from Apple,

That's good to know - thanks for the links. I was thinking apple pulled them, because apple being apple, doing apple things.

 

[mwegner]

I suspect a lot of the reported performance problems are from this Electron bug. Electron is using a private API that's causing a lot of window server overhead. Lots of things are Electron: Discord, Slack, Spotify, Unity Hub, etc.
There's a workaround in the GitHub issue thread. It won't persist a reboot, and you do have to restart any Electron application. Search processes in Activity Monitor for "(Renderer)" to find them if you aren't sure if you caught them all:

launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1

If you want to undo without a reboot, it's just:

launchctl unsetenv CHROME_HEADLESS

This workaround will ultimately remove window shadows on Electron apps, which is where the problem lies.

Before this bug turned up, I was worried Apple had bitten off more than they could chew with fill rate / memory bandwidth, so hopefully this is a big part of it instead...

 

[Woodcrest64]

M3 Max 48GB here. Same thing.

Agreed.

Ouch. This tells me more and more its just unoptimized or buggy code not anything to do with our machines.

Yeah, Sptzz's machine should be flying with Tahoe like a Formula 1 car. There's no reason a M3 Max with 48GB should be experiencing any UI stutter. I appreciate everyone's input on this as I do eventually want to upgrade to Tahoe for the Spotlight features. Keep up with the updates everyone!