The heaviest benchmark that no MacBook can handle - Word, someone with a MBP 16" that could help?

[Boomhowler]

Hi!

I am trying to guide some colleagues in choosing their next laptop and a lot of them want to use Macs this time. I off love this development but we have problems choosing between a MB Air and MBP 16" for some. This is the problem; they are using Word a lot for working with, for example, standardisation documents. These are huge word-docs and takes ~ 25 mins to load fully (in Print mode) on a M1 Air, so it is not really convincing to them that they should pick up an Air. For 95% of the other tasks they do they just work in Office, so the Air should really be enough, but these word-monster-docs really strains the computer.

Could anyone with an M1 MBP 16" (or 14") try to open the 3GPP specification 38.331 (https://portal.3gpp.org/desktopmodules/Specifications/SpecificationDetails.aspx?specificationId=3197, press "version" and then click the number on the latest variant)? You have to first download a zip-file, extract the word document and then open it. In print mode, and measure the time until you can scroll down to the last page (p963 or something like that). That would be really nice.

 

[ratspg]

Hi!

I am trying to guide some colleagues in choosing their next laptop and a lot of them want to use Macs this time. I off love this development but we have problems choosing between a MB Air and MBP 16" for some. This is the problem; they are using Word a lot for working with, for example, standardisation documents. These are huge word-docs and takes ~ 25 mins to load fully (in Print mode) on a M1 Air, so it is not really convincing to them that they should pick up an Air. For 95% of the other tasks they do they just work in Office, so the Air should really be enough, but these word-monster-docs really strains the computer.

Could anyone with an M1 MBP 16" (or 14") try to open the 3GPP specification 38.331 (https://portal.3gpp.org/desktopmodules/Specifications/SpecificationDetails.aspx?specificationId=3197, press "version" and then click the number on the latest variant)? You have to first download a zip-file, extract the word document and then open it. In print mode, and measure the time until you can scroll down to the last page (p963 or something like that). That would be really nice.

Hi!

Well I don't have Word on my 16" MBP M1 Pro. But I do have Pages.... Downloaded the .docx and it took 24 seconds to open the document from double-clicking on it. It took 15 seconds to scroll on the touchpad from page one to the final page of the document.

 

[solouki]

Hi Boomhowler,

I, too, attempted your test, and like ratspg, I don't have Word but I do have Libreoffice (free from Homebrew). Libreoffice opened the *.docx document in less than 8 seconds and scrolled through it without skipping or jitters just as fast as my fingers could make it scroll, with all of the pages wizzing by in a blur (much faster than my old eyes could see them). M1 Max 16" MBP.

Solouki

 

[Boomhowler]

Hi! Thank you both for trying that!

The problem is that if you want to edit something you "have" to use Word, otherwise the result gets garbled for the other people Pages (and Libre) is by far more efficient, as you also have noticed (it is similar speeds on the Air), so it would be incredibly nice if someone who has Word (from a free trial of office365, or bought it already etc) could try it with that application.

Personally, I would prefer that standardisation organisations didn't use such proprietary solutions as Word for documents, but changes are slow...

 

[solouki]

Hi! Thank you both for trying that!

The problem is that if you want to edit something you "have" to use Word, otherwise the result gets garbled for the other people Pages (and Libre) is by far more efficient, as you also have noticed (it is similar speeds on the Air), so it would be incredibly nice if someone who has Word (from a free trial of office365, or bought it already etc) could try it with that application.

Personally, I would prefer that standardisation organisations didn't use such proprietary solutions as Word for documents, but changes are slow...

Yes, I understand that you have to use Word, but I thought the Libreoffice test was pertinent since it is a free replacement for Word and opens the Word docx document in native format. In other words, the Libreoffice timings are likely a good indication for what Word will provide on a M1 Mac. Word should be at least as fast and perhaps faster.

Solouki

EDIT: Unless you have all of the Word fonts already loaded onto your Mac, then using Pages to open a Word docx document will take more time because it has to find substitute fonts for the Word fonts. In addition, as I discovered, when math is included in the Word docx document, then Pages will often convert the math expressions to images, which also takes more time. That's why I tested Libreoffice, as it opens the docx document natively.

Hope somebody with Word performs your test for you. Good luck.

 

[nothingtoseehere]

I was curious and opened the doc on a M1 Mac mini. It didn't take 25 minutes to open but only 3 or 4. But working in this document is not smooth, not snappy. Scrolling causes beachballs etc. - not a good experience.

Hopefully someone can report from a stronger Mac, and with the original Microsoft Word, as some people here said that Word on Mac would be worse at large docs compared to Word on PCs. (Alas, I have no PC at hand for a comparison.)

 

[Boomhowler]

I was curious and opened the doc on a M1 Mac mini. It didn't take 25 minutes to open but only 3 or 4. But working in this document is not smooth, not snappy. Scrolling causes beachballs etc. - not a good experience.

Hopefully someone can report from a stronger Mac, and with the original Microsoft Word, as some people here said that Word on Mac would be worse at large docs compared to Word on PCs. (Alas, I have no PC at hand for a comparison.)

ah yeah, that's why I specified the time it takes for all 900+ pages to load. It'll open "immediately" on an Air/Mini but it'll take 25 mins (-ish) to open the full document. Before that you simply cannot see the whole document.

Also, these documents takes the same time to load (even longer, depending on HW) on a PC, this is probably the worst use case for Word

 

[solouki]

ah yeah, that's why I specified the time it takes for all 900+ pages to load. It'll open "immediately" on an Air/Mini but it'll take 25 mins (-ish) to open the full document. Before that you simply cannot see the whole document.

Also, these documents takes the same time to load (even longer, depending on HW) on a PC, this is probably the worst use case for Word

Wow! Really, this document takes 25 mins to open fully? Why would anyone use Word then? On the M1 Max, it literally takes 5 seconds to load the entire document in Libreoffice, and it scrolls perfectly smoothly through all 966 pages just as fast as my fingers can scroll it from the trackpad (a couple dozen seconds more to scroll all the pages). I'm shocked that anyone would put up with this level of performance using Word, why not use Libreoffice and use it to write Word docx output?

 

[michalm]

It takes about 5 minutes to load of 16" Mac Pro. Sadly, Word for mac is single threaded(loading), so you won't see any differences in terms of core count. Scrolling is not super smooth either.

I'd suggest a different app, Word is really not well suited for this kind of thing :/

 

[solouki]

It takes about 5 minutes to load of 16" Mac Pro. Sadly, Word for mac is single threaded(loading), so you won't see any differences in terms of core count. Scrolling is not super smooth either.

I'd suggest a different app, Word is really not well suited for this kind of thing :/

Once again, Wow! I'm amazed that Word is so much slower than Libreoffice loading (5 seconds to fully load, and scrolls at top speed completely smoothly) the same docx document! Thanks for the information, Solouki

 

[Nermal]

I figured I'd open it on my Intel iMac (2020, fastest configuration available)... and gave up waiting after 6 minutes. It had loaded 507 pages by then. It seems that we can't blame the Arm conversion of Word for this one.

 

[solouki]

Hi all,

I made a screen recording of the Libreoffice loading this docx file so that you all can see it. The docx is fully loaded in about 6 seconds and then I took my time closing a window and scrolling through the first few pages. It is highly compressed (original recording is 89MB, compressed version is 2.5MB), so the quality is not great. I'll see if MacRumors will allow me to attach the recording to this post.

Solouki

 

[solouki]

I figured I'd open it on my Intel iMac (2020, fastest configuration available)... and gave up waiting after 6 minutes. It had loaded 507 pages by then. It seems that we can't blame the Arm conversion of Word for this one.

Hi Nermal,

I really don't understand these results. I must be doing something wrong ... help me figure out what I've done wrong.

I was employing Homebrew's Libreoffice to input the file 38331-g70.docx from the link in the OP's first post. Is this the incorrect file? It has 966 pages, and so seems to match what the OP stated, although it's not that large of a file.

If Word takes, what, like 10 or more minutes on a very fast 2020 Intel iMac, to load this document I am shocked that the M1 Max using Libreoffice takes just a few seconds to load it and scroll through the file. If this is truly the case, then it is unconscionable for a software company with near infinite resources to port and sell their application on another platform, but with it having such abominable performance. This can't possibly be the case can it? I must have done something wrong in my simplistic testing. What is it?

I'd love to know how fast Word under Windows loads this file, and whether it scrolls smoothly and without problems.

Thanks for your time,
Solouki

 

[solouki]

Hi all,

I decided to run a few more tests, so this time I loaded this docx document into Libreoffice on a 2020 M1 MBP and a 2019 i9 MBP. The M1 MBP fully loaded the file in 6 to 7 seconds (as close as I could measure) while the Intel i9 MBP fully loaded the file in 15.2 seconds (plus/minus 0.5 seconds for the slowness of my fingers operating the stopwatch app).

Both machines smoothly scrolled through the document as quickly as I could manage with the trackpad. In addition, if I use the scrollbar on the right-hand side of the Libreoffice window, I can scroll smoothly through the entire document, not missing a single page, in just a few seconds.

If anyone has performed this test using Word under Windows on a PC, I'd be interested in the results. Thanks.

Solouki

 

[Fuchal]

I think Office for Mac is fairly sluggish no matter the system, unfortunately. iWork and LibreOffice are generally much snappier overall. There are some other more lightweight editors that can open docx that might be a good option too.

 

[Boomhowler]

Hi all,

I decided to run a few more tests, so this time I loaded this docx document into Libreoffice on a 2020 M1 MBP and a 2019 i9 MBP. The M1 MBP fully loaded the file in 6 to 7 seconds (as close as I could measure) while the Intel i9 MBP fully loaded the file in 15.2 seconds (plus/minus 0.5 seconds for the slowness of my fingers operating the stopwatch app).

Both machines smoothly scrolled through the document as quickly as I could manage with the trackpad. In addition, if I use the scrollbar on the right-hand side of the Libreoffice window, I can scroll smoothly through the entire document, not missing a single page, in just a few seconds.

If anyone has performed this test using Word under Windows on a PC, I'd be interested in the results. Thanks.

Solouki

My colleagues with Windows report 30+ minutes load times on their HP laptops, similar to what is seen on the M1.

One of the weird things that Word does (in "print view") is that it loads a couple of pages at the time when the file is as large as this. So, the file opens "quickly", but you can only scroll down a couple of pages. Then after some seconds, you can get more and more pages. The document is indeed 966 pages that you said, it's just that Word does some weird .. rendering?? when it presents the document in "Print View".

 

[solouki]

My colleagues with Windows report 30+ minutes load times on their HP laptops, similar to what is seen on the M1.

Oh my! I had no idea. So let me get this straight, this file loads in Word under Windows on a PC in 30+ minutes, while the same file loads in Libreoffice under macOS on M1 and M1 Max Macs in around 6 seconds?! And scrolls smoothly through all 966 pages is seconds on the M1/M1 Max also. Whoa!

Why is Word so, so slow? Is it because MS does not have any competition for Word in the business world and thus haven't developed its performance? Why would anyone stick with Word when Libreoffice is between two and three orders of magnitude faster? It would seem that it would behoove one to transfer his/her docx from Word to Libreoffice in order to achieve this tremendous performance gain. [An analogous performance comparison would be to use an abacus at the grocery store compared to the laser SKU scanner to add up your purchases.]

I'm surprised -- and thanks for the information, I really appreciate it.

Solouki

 

[jerryk]

I wonder if somewhere in the document there are some Word specific features being used that are not triggered when opened in other editors that only support a subset of Word features. Sort of like when you open a Powerpoint presentation in Google Slides and lose a lot of the animation features.

 

[solouki]

I wonder if somewhere in the document there are some Word specific features being used that are not triggered when opened in other editors that only support a subset of Word features. Sort of like when you open a Powerpoint presentation in Google Slides and lose a lot of the animation features.

Jerryk, you are probably right, but Libreoffice claims (or at least attempts) to implement all Word features. There is probably some loss somewhere, but I'd think that a 2 to 3 order of magnitude performance improvement would provide quite the inducement to make the switch and hunt down and modify those few features that didn't translate appropriately.

 

[jerryk]

Jerryk, you are probably right, but Libreoffice claims (or at least attempts) to implement all Word features. There is probably some loss somewhere, but I'd think that a 2 to 3 order of magnitude performance improvement would provide quite the inducement to make the switch and hunt down and modify those few features that didn't translate appropriately.

Based on the time difference, I wonder if it is something that connects to a server for some reason. Assuming this was a recent change, it would interesting to see if some did something like added an interactive graph, something need rendering, ....

I am assuming the document was not like this originally. And the fact that it is now slow with Word regardless of platform (Windows or M1 Mac) seem related to a feature of the document.

FWIW, I have Word on my M1 systems and Windows machines. It is fast on both.

 

[donawalt]

I am not sure I understand the exact "test". I have a M1 Max 16", 64GB. I open it, the screen is open and I can do things in Word 365 in 6 seconds. I can press and hold the scroll down immediately thereafter, and it scrolls smoothly. It's ONLY when I look at the bottom barm I see it says it's 30 pages....45 pages....and takes along time to get to 900 pages. It opens and does things very quickly, but all pages are not open for some time, So, what's the real test specifically, what are you timing, can you be more precise on the test?

 

[Nermal]

The test is "how long before you can get to page 966"? As you noticed, you can only see the first dozen or so pages at first.

 

[donawalt]

So, here is what I did - MacBook Pro M1Max, 64GB. I double clicked on the file, time 8:19:00. The first page showed in 5-6 seconds. I hit F5, it was set to goto "Page", I typed 900 and hit OK (not knowing the exact number of pages. At 8:21:20, 2 minutes 20 seconds later, I was sitting on page 900. That's not so bad?

 

[solouki]

So, here is what I did - MacBook Pro M1Max, 64GB. I double clicked on the file, time 8:19:00. The first page showed in 5-6 seconds. I hit F5, it was set to goto "Page", I typed 900 and hit OK (not knowing the exact number of pages. At 8:21:20, 2 minutes 20 seconds later, I was sitting on page 900. That's not so bad?

Hi donawalt,

Yes, so Word 365 on the very fast M1 Max with 64GB of unified RAM takes 2 minutes and 20 seconds, not necessarily to render each page out to page 900, but rather to search through 899 pagebreaks and then render page 900.

Well, in my hands, Libreoffice actually renders all 966 pages in 6 seconds flat. For instance, I can start a stopwatch, click on the Open File button, after six seconds I can then use the right-hand side scroll bar to scroll through all of the 966 pages, viewing each and every page clearly and smoothly, in just a few seconds, say 2 to 3 seconds, depending on the agility of my fingers on the trackpad manipulating the scroll bar.

In other words, Libreeoffice has actually rendered all 966 pages of the docx document into viewable print pages in just 6 seconds, while word takes 30+ minutes on an HP laptop to do the same thing in Word. And you yourself found that Word only renders the first few pages in the first 6 seconds and then slowly renders the remaining 966 pages over time. If you skipped ahead to page 900, it took Word 2 minutes 20 seconds to find page 900 and render it. [I don't know if Word simply searched through 899 pagebreaks and then rendered only page 900 or if Word actually rendered all of the pages from 1 to 900 to get to page 900. It would be silly to actually render all of the pages 1-900 just to get to page 900, but that may be what Word is doing (for example, some PDF readers, if you do a similar thing of typing in a distant page to view will simply jump to that page and render it and not render all of the intermediate pages). I don't really know how Word works, so maybe (probably) Word had to render the first 899 pages to get to page 900, in which case, on your fast M1 Max it took Word 2 minutes and 20 second to render 900 pages while Libreoffice takes 6 seconds to render 966 pages -- which, by my calculations, makes Libreoffice 32 times faster (3100% faster) than Word on the M1 Max performing the same task.]

I know that the OP and others may consider this a large Word file and a tough benchmark, but personally I don't think this 966 page document is that difficult of a test (it is only 2.4MB in size). For example, I often load 10000+ page PDF documents containing hundreds of different fonts and font sizes, tens of thousands of math equations, thousands of vector diagrams, hundreds of pixel images, and hundreds of formatted tables, all of which must be rendered (the PDFs are several hundred MBs in size each). These documents load in seconds and I can scroll through all 10000+ of the rendered pages in seconds too. This is a much more difficult task than the above 966 page document: it has many, many more fonts, math, photos, diagrams, tables, etc. to render. But the apps work well and are written for performance. [Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the 1990s I actually attempted to write math, physics, and chemistry in Word, but when I got to around 50 pages of math equations Word just crashed, so at that point I switched to TeX and now have 25000+ pages of technical math writing that performs quite quickly and well in TeX. It is disappointing to me that Word appears not to have improved its performance to keep up.]

In summary: On the same machine (M1 Max) Libreoffice is 3100% faster than Word performing the same task. Frankly, I'm shocked and saddened by this. [And this performance enhancement of 3100% for Libreoffice over Word is actually a best case scenario (minimum enhancement) for Word. It is based on the assumption that Word actually rendered the first 899 pages in print viewable pages before getting to page 900. This is likely, but not necessary, and depending on how docx documents work, Word could have skipped to page 900 and only rendered it as a printable page -- then the performance enhancement of Libreoffice would be much, much larger than 3100% since Libreoffice actually renders all 966 pages of this docx into print pages in just seconds.]

Solouki

EDIT: I added the summary of the performance difference between Libreoffice and Word.

 

[Boomhowler]

So, here is what I did - MacBook Pro M1Max, 64GB. I double clicked on the file, time 8:19:00. The first page showed in 5-6 seconds. I hit F5, it was set to goto "Page", I typed 900 and hit OK (not knowing the exact number of pages. At 8:21:20, 2 minutes 20 seconds later, I was sitting on page 900. That's not so bad?

No that sounds great actually, I can't even run the "go to page" on the air somehow.

Hi donawalt,

...

I know that the OP and others may consider this a large Word file and a tough benchmark, but personally I don't think this 966 page document is that difficult of a test (it is only 2.4MB in size). For example, I often load 10000+ page PDF documents containing hundreds of different fonts and font sizes, tens of thousands of math equations, thousands of vector diagrams, hundreds of pixel images, and hundreds of formatted tables, all of which must be rendered (the PDFs are several hundred MBs in size each). These documents load in seconds and I can scroll through all 10000+ of the rendered pages in seconds too. This is a much more difficult task than the above 966 page document: it has many, many more fonts, math, photos, diagrams, tables, etc. to render. But the apps work well and are written for performance. [Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the 1990s I actually attempted to write math, physics, and chemistry in Word, but when I got to around 50 pages of math equations Word just crashed, so at that point I switched to TeX and now have 25000+ pages of technical math writing that performs quite quickly and well in TeX. It is disappointing to me that Word appears not to have improved its performance to keep up.]

In summary: On the same machine (M1 Max) Libreoffice is 3100% faster than Word performing the same task. Frankly, I'm shocked and saddened by this.

Solouki

EDIT: I added the summary of the performance difference between Libreoffice and Word.

No, I agree, this is a crazy small file for a computer to handle. Any modern computer should not break a sweat when opening a 900 page text file.. it's crazy, those files should fit on a floppy Word (in print view) does something that is super-not-optimized. Personally I prefer LaTeX, but it is not always possible to use that.

In the 3GPP example, Word is the only program that is allowed to use when editing the standards. They did some investigations years ago and found that some features in Open office didn't translate at all when the docs where opened with Word, so then Word "won". I was not part of this work and I surely would not have advocated for using Word instead of the open variants.. and the most used feature that the author's want from word is "track changes" and similar tools, and those are frankly pretty good in Word. But surely Libre Office should be equally good for that, and still let us open documents within seconds

Also, this behaviour has been around for years so it is not due to any online-editing-contact-thing. It's just a badly written software, when using Print view (the default view).

Thank you everyone for contributing here, I got a lot of info from your testing here. I'll continue to advocate that the "lightweight" users should get an Air for Office-work and switch to either Draft view (it is super quick, try it if you have Word) or use another editor such as Pages or Libre. Also, I'll maybe think about sending in a contribution to change from Word it is probably a non-winnable-battle, but maybe one can stir the pot a bit.