Hello Folks!
I was using a MacBook Pro M1 Max maxed out since its initial release up to macOS 13 Ventura. When on my desk, I was plugging it to a Sonnet Echo 5 Thunderbolt 4 Hub which was in turn plugged to my peripherals which are essentially a Pro Display XDR and an Audient Evo 8 interface. All those were connected using official Apple Thunderbolt Pro cables. Either the one that come with the Pro Display XDR or others that I bought straight from Apple.
That setup worked flawlessly for the last couple of years.
Couple of months ago I decided to upgrade it and go with a MacBook Air M2 maxed out for portability and at my desk I got a Mac Studio M2 Ultra also maxed out. The MacBook Air M2 works perfectly fine for my mobility needs ~and has not caused any of the issues I'm reporting here~.
I've then just plugged the Mac Studio into the thunderbolt cable from the Echo 5, plugged in the wall, and all the setup was working just fine. Soon enough, I started to missing the secondary display that the old MacBook Pro provided me. To fill that void, I got a Studio display couple of weeks after the Mac Studio with the VESA mount so I can rotate it on the side.
For a few days, it worked perfectly fine. The machine is a beast! Then, MacOS 14 Sonoma was released, and I've upgraded. Then my honeymoon with the new machine came to an end...
After a cold boot and roughly a day of work, the machine just feels like crap. It stutters like hell. The clear indicators that the "problem" is happening is that although I have very low (almost 0) CPU/memory usage, the text input just freezes. I can't write anything. Scroll on web pages still work, but when I click on links it just don't do anything until it "unfreeze". If I double tap the Magic Mouse with 2 fingers to show Mission Control, the animation freezes for a few seconds sometimes on Pro Display, sometimes on the Studio display. All those symptoms happen together when the "freeze" is happening. A series of stuttering all over the place and as I said, there is absolutely nothing consuming resources at that time. No spikes, nothing. The temperature also never went more than 40C with usual 35C while I'm working most of the time with the fans never getting to 1k RPM. The only time resources are visible high are when I'm cooking/building the game client which doesn't happen very ofter and funny enough, the issue never happened on those occasions and the system remained responsive the whole process (which used to slow down considerably my old MacBook Pro M1 Max).
Even while writing THIS post I got the stutters happening twice...
I'm a software engineer working in the games industry, so I usually have a lot of Safari tabs/windows spread across the monitor. Slack, Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp, all open usually on the secondary display and my main code editors (usually Jetbrain Rider, XCode or VSCode) on the main screen along with the game engine Editor. Even with all that open, code being built, applications being run/debugged, the resource consumption is very low (monitored both from Activity Monitor and iStats).
Here are the things I've tried over the past couple of weeks in order to try identify and isolate the potential problematic application:
1. Uninstalled and avoided using each one of the instant messaging apps individually (except iMessage which is native so I just haven't opened it) as they are all non-native apps (even tho compiled to Apple Silicon) and instead, HTML5 apps wrapped on Electron/Chromium shells, which could be a potential perf problem;
2. Replaced Safari with Edge as I've seen some reports everywhere else that Google was intentionally causing Safari to slow down and hang when you have YouTube on it;
3. Used only VSCode, then only Rider in order to isolate the developer tools I have;
4. Cleared the data and start over with MacOS (Erase settings and Data from System Preferences);
5. Cleared the whole Mac including the recovery partition using the recovery tools making it a fresh installed machine, which reverted back to Ventura. Then upgraded to Sonoma again before install anything else;
6. Made sure Desktop & Dock > Displays have separate Spaces was set to true, as per recommendation from another post I got here on Mac Rumors;
7. Remove the Echo 5 and connect both displays to the Mac Studio directly - Even tho the Echo 5 state it supports 2 Pro Displays I thought it was a good test;
8. Unrotate the Studio Display back to the default horizontal orientation - The product page clearly say the VESA mount mode support horizontal orientation and when I do rotate it physically, MacOS automatically rotate it for me. However, I'm not sure if there is any issues when having it rotate that would cause freezes on rendering, so it didn't hurt to test;
9. Reduced the Display scale. On the Pro Display XDR I always used "More Space", so I did the same with the Studio Display. However, I've seen over the web that the scaling could cause performance issues on Macs before. Not sure if it still the case Today specially with a overkill machine like M2 Ultra but, I did it a try and made the Studio Display in the default scale;
10. Ran the full hardware diagnostics from Apple on the Mac Studio with both displays connected from the recovery boot mode, no issues detected;
11. Checked with Clean My Mac if there was anything suspicious running in the background (even tho the machine was just fully reinstalled).
None of those attempts stopped the issue from happen. After the freeze, the machine works perfectly fine for a while, then the freeze happens again.
One thing to note is that I have 3 Apple cables. Two of them, came in the box with both displays which are Thunderbolt 3, and one of them, I bought the new version, which is the Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable. The fun fact is that those cables are externally the same, so I don't know anymore how to different them nor if they would make any difference in this setup/problem.
The thing is, I can't find wth happens with my system. Those stuttering and freezings are REALLY annoying. Specially for someone that spent so much money on this new setup.
Does anyone ever has anything similar or has any idea that could point out a lead on what is going on?
I'm trying to avoid going to Apple Store for support as they will require me to bring the machine and both monitors there for "diagnostics" but I'm very confident there is nothing wrong with the hardware (except the cables which I don't know if there is anything nitpicking with the cables that came with the box and the TB4 one).
Any light on this would be REALLY appreciated.
Thanks!
Update: The two monitors with the MacBook Air cause the same problem.
I was using a MacBook Pro M1 Max maxed out since its initial release up to macOS 13 Ventura. When on my desk, I was plugging it to a Sonnet Echo 5 Thunderbolt 4 Hub which was in turn plugged to my peripherals which are essentially a Pro Display XDR and an Audient Evo 8 interface. All those were connected using official Apple Thunderbolt Pro cables. Either the one that come with the Pro Display XDR or others that I bought straight from Apple.
That setup worked flawlessly for the last couple of years.
Couple of months ago I decided to upgrade it and go with a MacBook Air M2 maxed out for portability and at my desk I got a Mac Studio M2 Ultra also maxed out. The MacBook Air M2 works perfectly fine for my mobility needs ~and has not caused any of the issues I'm reporting here~.
I've then just plugged the Mac Studio into the thunderbolt cable from the Echo 5, plugged in the wall, and all the setup was working just fine. Soon enough, I started to missing the secondary display that the old MacBook Pro provided me. To fill that void, I got a Studio display couple of weeks after the Mac Studio with the VESA mount so I can rotate it on the side.
For a few days, it worked perfectly fine. The machine is a beast! Then, MacOS 14 Sonoma was released, and I've upgraded. Then my honeymoon with the new machine came to an end...
After a cold boot and roughly a day of work, the machine just feels like crap. It stutters like hell. The clear indicators that the "problem" is happening is that although I have very low (almost 0) CPU/memory usage, the text input just freezes. I can't write anything. Scroll on web pages still work, but when I click on links it just don't do anything until it "unfreeze". If I double tap the Magic Mouse with 2 fingers to show Mission Control, the animation freezes for a few seconds sometimes on Pro Display, sometimes on the Studio display. All those symptoms happen together when the "freeze" is happening. A series of stuttering all over the place and as I said, there is absolutely nothing consuming resources at that time. No spikes, nothing. The temperature also never went more than 40C with usual 35C while I'm working most of the time with the fans never getting to 1k RPM. The only time resources are visible high are when I'm cooking/building the game client which doesn't happen very ofter and funny enough, the issue never happened on those occasions and the system remained responsive the whole process (which used to slow down considerably my old MacBook Pro M1 Max).
Even while writing THIS post I got the stutters happening twice...
I'm a software engineer working in the games industry, so I usually have a lot of Safari tabs/windows spread across the monitor. Slack, Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp, all open usually on the secondary display and my main code editors (usually Jetbrain Rider, XCode or VSCode) on the main screen along with the game engine Editor. Even with all that open, code being built, applications being run/debugged, the resource consumption is very low (monitored both from Activity Monitor and iStats).
Here are the things I've tried over the past couple of weeks in order to try identify and isolate the potential problematic application:
1. Uninstalled and avoided using each one of the instant messaging apps individually (except iMessage which is native so I just haven't opened it) as they are all non-native apps (even tho compiled to Apple Silicon) and instead, HTML5 apps wrapped on Electron/Chromium shells, which could be a potential perf problem;
2. Replaced Safari with Edge as I've seen some reports everywhere else that Google was intentionally causing Safari to slow down and hang when you have YouTube on it;
3. Used only VSCode, then only Rider in order to isolate the developer tools I have;
4. Cleared the data and start over with MacOS (Erase settings and Data from System Preferences);
5. Cleared the whole Mac including the recovery partition using the recovery tools making it a fresh installed machine, which reverted back to Ventura. Then upgraded to Sonoma again before install anything else;
6. Made sure Desktop & Dock > Displays have separate Spaces was set to true, as per recommendation from another post I got here on Mac Rumors;
7. Remove the Echo 5 and connect both displays to the Mac Studio directly - Even tho the Echo 5 state it supports 2 Pro Displays I thought it was a good test;
8. Unrotate the Studio Display back to the default horizontal orientation - The product page clearly say the VESA mount mode support horizontal orientation and when I do rotate it physically, MacOS automatically rotate it for me. However, I'm not sure if there is any issues when having it rotate that would cause freezes on rendering, so it didn't hurt to test;
9. Reduced the Display scale. On the Pro Display XDR I always used "More Space", so I did the same with the Studio Display. However, I've seen over the web that the scaling could cause performance issues on Macs before. Not sure if it still the case Today specially with a overkill machine like M2 Ultra but, I did it a try and made the Studio Display in the default scale;
10. Ran the full hardware diagnostics from Apple on the Mac Studio with both displays connected from the recovery boot mode, no issues detected;
11. Checked with Clean My Mac if there was anything suspicious running in the background (even tho the machine was just fully reinstalled).
None of those attempts stopped the issue from happen. After the freeze, the machine works perfectly fine for a while, then the freeze happens again.
One thing to note is that I have 3 Apple cables. Two of them, came in the box with both displays which are Thunderbolt 3, and one of them, I bought the new version, which is the Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable. The fun fact is that those cables are externally the same, so I don't know anymore how to different them nor if they would make any difference in this setup/problem.
The thing is, I can't find wth happens with my system. Those stuttering and freezings are REALLY annoying. Specially for someone that spent so much money on this new setup.
Does anyone ever has anything similar or has any idea that could point out a lead on what is going on?
I'm trying to avoid going to Apple Store for support as they will require me to bring the machine and both monitors there for "diagnostics" but I'm very confident there is nothing wrong with the hardware (except the cables which I don't know if there is anything nitpicking with the cables that came with the box and the TB4 one).
Any light on this would be REALLY appreciated.
Thanks!
Update: The two monitors with the MacBook Air cause the same problem.
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