i’m a senior in college and for the past 3 years i’ve used a 2020 13” inch macbook pro. it was amazing and did everything i needed for university and then some. last year i spilled some water on it and it stopped working completely it made more financial sense to get a new computer than to pay the price they wanted to fix it. so it’s bricked essentially. i got a m2 macbook air as a replacement after hearing such good things about it. it is genuinely the worst machine i’ve ever used and it makes it near imposssible to do do work. nothing loads from webpages to programs and i can’t deal with it anymore. my course load requires using adobe suite and i can’t do that on here reliably. i’m at a crossroad because i spent $1700 on the computer and apple care for 3 years. i’m planning on selling the m2 air and fixing the pro but i’m really stuck and would love some advice. or does it make sense to invest in an m3 a pro as a method of future proofing. any advice would be greatly appreciated
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If you have 8gb ram and your ssd is full it will get really slow. No room for swap. You must leave free space in your internal drive. Which is why I recommend anyone doing creative work to just get a 14” pro. Even M1 Pro with 16gb ram.
If it’s base model 8GB 256GB then there’s your problem. Maxtech on Youtube proved beyond doubt the SSD on this model is a problem. That isn’t to say it’s a bad machine, but you’ve clearly noticed the limits. A pro with 16GB 512GB+ will serve you well. Even the M1 versions can be found for good prices now.
If it’s base model 8GB 256GB then there’s your problem. Maxtech on Youtube proved beyond doubt the SSD on this model is a problem. That isn’t to say it’s a bad machine, but you’ve clearly noticed the limits. A pro with 16GB 512GB+ will serve you well. Even the M1 versions can be found for good prices now.
Your professional opinion here is that there is some YouTuber out there that proved beyond doubt that these brand new M2s with 8GB RAM are incapable of browsing the internet.
I just want to make sure I got that right.
I had a 16gb/512 i7 2020 MacBook Pro 13. (That I got for free due to the apple keyboard issues). I traded it in on a m2 base MacBook Pro 15. I am a computer engineering student and honestly I’ve never had any problems with my new MacBook. I can run whatever I want and it even games pretty well. The battery is amazing too. The only annoying thing is that boot camp isn’t available, but I just pirated parallels so it’s whatever.
I would suggest taking a look at the activity monitor and see if it gives any clues of what’s causing the issues. Is the processor having some abnormal usage? High usage when idle? How much RAM do you have free? Test with the computer on idle and using the programs that are running slow.
Try closing everything and running a single program, like illustrator. Does it work fine? Is your machine maybe overheating? I believe the Air is fanless, so this can be causing it to throttle using heavy applications.
I believe that you need to do a bit more of diagnosing to try pinpointing the exact source of your issues
Try to check everything with cleanMyMac (they have trial and some discount for Black Friday) , and remember that MacBooks with 256gb ssd are a bit slower, so you need to keep enough free space to prevent problems.
I have the M1 2020 pro 13’ you broke, it’s fast, powerful and reliable, though whether it’s better to fix it or get a new one depends mostly on the price difference
Odd we have had zero Issues with our m2 mba 16/256. It’s a beast
‘I don’t have it therefore it doesn’t exist’
Odd we have had zero Issues with our m2 mba 16/256. It’s a beast
I would suggest taking a look at the activity monitor and see if it gives any clues of what’s causing the issues. Is the processor having some abnormal usage? High usage when idle? How much RAM do you have free? Test with the computer on idle and using the programs that are running slow.
Try closing everything and running a single program, like illustrator. Does it work fine? Is your machine maybe overheating? I believe the Air is fanless, so this can be causing it to throttle using heavy applications.
I believe that you need to do a bit more of diagnosing to try pinpointing the exact source of your issues
I manage a fleet of Macs, 400 at last count, and I have many faculty and staff using M1 and M2, mostly base model Air… No issues, other than slower performance on heavy stuff. I’m wondering if you should try doing a wipe of your hard drive and reinstall the current macOS.
It’s really hard to say without being able to ssh into your machine and run some commands on the terminal while you are using adobe suite. One super easy to use tool (that’s worth paying for) is iStat, which is a menu bar that gives you information on CPU/RAM/Disk usage in the menu bar. That will give you a good idea what the bottle neck even is.
It’s definitely possible that there is a hardware fault here, like one, or multiple of the CPU cores aren’t being able to be used, the L1/L2 cache is messed up, there’s a fault on your bus connecting the RAM. All of that would explain your reported issues, which is a systematic slowness, independent of load, which happens on all the software you try to run. Alternatively, there could be some program you are running (or virus) which is just eating system resources, so do a restart and check activity monitor (or use iStat) and see what’s going on.
The easiest path to a fix here: go to the Apple Store and have them take a look. Otherwise, you’ll have to figure out how to run these diagnostics yourself. Good luck.
It’s really hard to say without being able to ssh into your machine and run some commands on the terminal while you are using adobe suite. One super easy to use tool (that’s worth paying for) is iStat, which is a menu bar that gives you information on CPU/RAM/Disk usage in the menu bar. That will give you a good idea what the bottle neck even is.
It’s definitely possible that there is a hardware fault here, like one, or multiple of the CPU cores aren’t being able to be used, the L1/L2 cache is messed up, there’s a fault on your bus connecting the RAM. All of that would explain your reported issues, which is a systematic slowness, independent of load, which happens on all the software you try to run. Alternatively, there could be some program you are running (or virus) which is just eating system resources, so do a restart and check activity monitor (or use iStat) and see what’s going on.
The easiest path to a fix here: go to the Apple Store and have them take a look. Otherwise, you’ll have to figure out how to run these diagnostics yourself. Good luck.
I have the M1 2020 pro 13’ you broke, it’s fast, powerful and reliable, though whether it’s better to fix it or get a new one depends mostly on the price difference
Look you may have an lambo but somehow it runs at only 10 miles an hour. It’s not a systemic issue that affects all lambos, everyone else’s runs well. You just got unlucky, go back to apple tell them your problem and fix it.
“He didn’t rape me so clearly he’s not a rapist”
My M2 also sucks ass. I think Apple’s QC has gone downhill a lot since a few years ago.
What do you mean by “nothing loads from webpages to programs”? And what’s unreliable about running the Adobe suite?
Even x86 apps run fine on Apple Silicon, there really shouldn’t be any problems.