> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news
Not when one of those decides to wreck havoc - spotlight indexing issues slowly eating away your disk space, icloud sync spinning over and over and hanging any app that tries to read your Documents folder, Photos sync pegging all cores at 100%… it feels like things might be getting a little out of hand. How can anyone model/predict system behaviour with so many moving parts?
Pretty heavy iMessage user here, but I can't say I experience any issues, and that's probably why your issue is not getting fixed - ie. nobody at Apple is able to reproduce it. Maybe you should gather some info about it and see if you can send a bug report?
fair point, I should — one classic symptom I experience is the emoji picker will make it crash, not load quickly, and if it finishes loading they all appear as empty placeholders (maybe because I have way too many stickers and iCloud sync is tripping? idk)
and if it paid off, that would almost be acceptable! But no. After spotlight has indexed my /Applications folder, when I hit command-spacebar and type "preview.app", it takes ~4 seconds on my M4 laptop to search the sqlite database for it and return that entry.
I have the same issue on my M4 Macbook Pro and I had it on my previous M2 Apple Mac Mini, on several macOS versions (pre-Tahoe). I suspect it has to do with the virtual filesystem layer, as I had used OneDrive for Mac and now Proton Drive. Whatever it is, it has been broken for years on several devices and OSes and I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care about it.
On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the “Applications” view (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start, I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications view. The search is instant.
Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files it found on the filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot. Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing that each time required running some arcane commands in the terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac.
But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my solution is gone now.
All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release, crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the only GPU programming option, I think I’m going to be switching back to Linux.
> I quickly found out that Apple Instruments doesn’t support fetching more than 10 counters, sometimes 8, and sometimes less. I was constantly getting errors like '<SOME_COUNTER>' conflicts with a previously added event. The maximum that I could get is 10 counters. So, the first takeaway was that there is a limit to how many counters I can fetch, and another is that counters are, in some way, incompatible with each other. Why and how they’re incompatible is a good question.
I may be a spotlight unicorn, but I’ve never seen this behavior people complain about. Spotlight has always been instant for me, since its introduction and I’ve never seen a regression.
It is completely useless on network mounts, however, where I resort to find/grep/rg
I’ve actually had worse problems as recently as last week: Apps stopped showing up completely in spotlight.
Only a system reinstall + manually deleting all index files fixed it. Meanwhile it was eating 20-30GB of disk space. There are tons of reports of this in the apple forums.
Even then, it feels a lot slower in MacOS 26 than it did before, and you often get the rug-pull effect of your results changing a millisecond before you press the enter key. I would pay good money to go back to Snow Leopard.
I had the same problem last year, re-indexing all the files fixed it for me[1].
That being said, macOS was definitely more snappy back on Catalina, which was the first version I had so I can't vouch for Snow Leopard. Each update after Catalina felt gradually worse and from what i heard Tahoe feels like the last nail in the coffin.
I hope the UX team will deliver a more polished, expressive and minimal design next time.
I just got my first ARM Mac to replace my work Win machine (what has MS done to Windows!?!? :'()
Used to be I could type "display" and Id get right to display settings in settings. Now it shows thousands of useless links to who knows what. Instead I have to type "settings" and then, within settings, type "display"
Still better than the Windows shit show.
Honestly, a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today.
Genuine question, when people talk about apple silicon being fast, is the comparison to windows intel laptops, or Mac intel architecture?
Because, when running a Linux intel laptop, even with crowd strike and a LOT of corporate ware, there is no slowness.
When blogs talk about "fast" like this I always assumed it was for heavy lifting, such as video editing or AI stuff, not just day to day regular stuff.
I'm confused, is there a speed difference in day to day corporate work between new Macs and new Linux laptops?
I use pretty much all platforms and architectures as my "daily drivers" - x64, Apple Silicon, and ARM Cortex, with various mixtures of Linux/Mac/Windows.
When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in performance, and battery life is more variable now.
Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU, GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher memory bandwidth/lower latency.
I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's competitive in the latest generation.
This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever.
My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.
I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.
My work MBP also can drain the battery in a couple hours of light use. But that's because of FireEye / Microsoft Defender. FireEye has a bug where it pegs the CPU at 100% indefinitely and needs to be killed to stop its infinite loop. Defender hates when a git checkout changes 30,000 files and uses up all my battery (but I can't monitor this because I can't view the processes).
It’s always the corporate wares that caused the issues, in my case it’s crowdstrike and zscaler. Even with these wares I can last a full day with my M1 pro, I only notice the battery was drained to 0 once when I went to vacation for a week, it’s never happened before these wares
Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.
That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.
> Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage.
Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no OS can manage today.
Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop pcs.
I looked into this for the M1 MBA and it had the exact same performance at full load as the MBP...for 7 minutes. Then the thermal throttling hits and it slows down. I'm not sure what the time limit is for newer models. Regardless, the MBA's aren't offered with Pro/Ultra chips, which I desire (and would thermally throttle much sooner than 7 minutes).
My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is entirely based on whether they do anything that will load the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a lot.
My M1 MacBook Air is honestly the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Still snappy and responsive years after release. Fantastic machine. I’m starting to crave an M5 Air…
Apple chips are very good especially for their power envelope but let's not get ahead of ourselves, the only way a Macbook Air feels competitive with a top-of-the-line desktop is if you're not actually utilizing the full sustained power of the desktop. There's a reason why Apple sells much bigger Max/Ultra chips with active cooling.
I do believe Apple are still the fastest single-core (M5, A19 Pro, and M3 Ultra leading), which still matters for a shocking amount of my workloads. But only the M5 has any noticeable gap vs Intel (~16%). Also the rankings are a bit gamed because AMD and Intel put out a LOT of SKU's that are nearly the same product, so whenever they're "winning" on a benchmark they take up a bunch of slots right next to eachother even though they're all basically the exact same chip.
Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload still apply, of course.
And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor, but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in multicore benchmarks.
No, the AMD headliners still dominate for single-core performance[1]. Even if you normalize for similar/"same" chips; which really just means you have five cores each generation: AMD's, Intel's, Apple's, and ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-X.
Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.
But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.
Even at the time of announcement M5 was not the fastest chip. Not even on single core benchmark where apple usually shines due to the design choice of having fewer but more powerful cores (AMD for examples does the opposite). For example on geekbench Core i9-14900KS and Core Ultra 9 285K were faster.
The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.
Don’t worry, my new M4 doesn’t feel much faster either due to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got ported to Mac it’s become terrible in I/O and overall responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire core or two on Defender processes.
My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.
I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now: beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… Reminds me of the bad old days of Win XP.
How much RAM do you have? That seems to be the main thing that slows down my MacBooks (original launch-day 16GB M1 MBP and 32 GB M2 Pro). The M1 CPU is finally starting to show its age for some things, but the M2 Pro is really only RAM limited in perceived speed for me.
The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.
At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].
But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.
[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.
I don't get your first line. When people talk about Apple's core speeds they're not talking about cycles per instruction or something, they're talking about single-thread performance on a benchmark like Geekbench. Geekbench runs various real-world code and it's the gross throughput that is measured, and it's there that Apple cores shine.
> It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.
That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive. In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider architecture is actually faster than the competition in an absolute sense even at the deployed clock rates. There's really no significant market where you'd want to use anything different for CPU compute anywhere. Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or Zen 5c every time they're measured too.
Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are die size and packaging: their cores take a little more area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings with much higher per-part margins.
Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple to do the same soon.
[1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs are fast enough and have been for years now, and the stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized out of its market space, but then that's true of every premium vendor throughout history.
For laptops at least, I appreciate not having fans that sound like a helicopter. I guess for Mac Mini and Mac Studio having more fan noise is acceptable (maybe a switch would be nice). One of the things that I love about my Air is there is zero fan noise all the time. Yes, it throttles, and 99% of the time I don’t notice and don’t care. Yes, I know there are workloads where it would be very noticeable and I would care, but I don’t personally run too many CPU bound tasks.
Nowhere in the submission or even the comment you replied to did anyone say "fastest". The incredibly weird knee-jerk defensiveness by some is bizarre.
It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying background needs, in this case talking specifically about Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same reason.
Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb).
Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba mount through our corporate VPN.
- Much faster than my intel Mac
- Faster than my Windows
- Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but with my current job I no longer get to use them much for desktop (unfortunately).
Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just sleeps/wakes up with no problems.
The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery, decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer keypress)
Part of it is that the data pipelines in the Mac are far more efficient with its soldered memory and enhanced buses. You would have to use something like Halo Strix on the PC side see similar performance upticks at a somewhat affordable price bracket. Things like Samba/VPN mounting should not matter much (unless your mac network interface is significantly better), but you might see a general snappiness improvement. Heavy compute tasks will be a give and take with modern PC hardware, but Apple is still the king of efficiency.
I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with virtually no compromises.
I love apple and mainly use one for personal use, but apple users consistently overrate how fast their machines are. I used to see sentiment like "how will nvidia ever catch up with apples unified silicon approach" a few years ago. But if you just try nvidia vs apple and compare on a per dollar level, nvidia is so obviously the winner.
What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.
Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.
Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered.
I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop review coverage before asking questions like this.
There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions.
Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.
Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.
Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.
Can't Windows/Linux pin background threads to specific cores on Intel too? So that your foreground app isn't slowed down by all the background activity going on? Or there's something else to it that I don't understand. I thought E cores' main advantage is that they use less power which is good for battery life on laptops. But the article makes it sound like main advantage of Apple Silicon is that it splits foreground/background workloads better. Isn't it something that can already be done without a P/E distinction?
These processors are good all around. The P cores kick butt too.
I ran a performance test back in October comparing M4 laptops against high-end Windows desktops, and the results showed the M-series chips coming out on top.
This is likely more of a Windows filesystem benchmark than anything else: there are fundamental restrictions on how fast file access can be on Windows due to filesystem filter drivers. I would bet that if you tried again with Linux (or even in WSL2, as long as you stay in the WSL filesystem image), you'd see significantly improved results.
From your article it seems like you benchmark compile times. I am not an expert on the subject, but I don't see the point in comparing ARM compilation times with Intel. There are probably different tricks involved in compilation and the instructions set are not the same.
Are the Intel systems plugged in when running those tests? Usually when Apple machines do the tests then the difference between battery/plugged in is small if any.
Does anyone have any insight into the MacOS scheduler and the algorithm it uses to place threads on E vs. P cores? Is it as simple as noting whether a thread was last suspended blocking on I/O or for a time slice timeout and mapping I/O blockers to E cores and time slice blockers to P cores? Or does the programmer indicate a static mapping at thread creation? I write code on a Mac all the time, but I use Clojure and all the low level OS decisions are opaque to me.
The baseline is static: low QoS tasks are dispatched to the E cores, while high QoS tasks are dispatched to P cores. IIRC high QoS cores can migrate to the E cores if all P cores are loaded, but my understanding is that the lowest QoS tasks (background) never get promoted to P cores.
The Apple software stack makes heavy use of thread pools via libdispatch. Individual work items are tagged with QoS, which influences which thread picks up the work item from the queue.
The article mentions P or E is generally decided by if it's a "background" process (whatever than means). Possible some (undocumented) designation in code or directive to the compiler of the binary decides this at compile time.
> Admittedly the impression isn’t helped by a dreadful piece of psychology, as those E cores at 100% are probably running at a frequency a quarter of those of P cores shown at the same 100%
It’s about half, actually
> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news
My M2 MBA doesn't have a fan but literally smokes the majority on Intel systems which are space heaters this time of year. Those legacy x86 apps don't really exist for the majority of people anymore.
>If you use an Apple silicon Mac I’m sure you have been impressed by its performance.
This article couldn't have come at a better time. Because frankly speaking I am not that impressed after I tested Omarchy Linux. Everything was snappy. It is like back to DOS or Windows 3.11 era. ( Not quite but close ) It makes me wonder why Mac couldn't be like that.
Apple Silicon is fast, no doubt about it. It isn't some benchmarks but even under emulation, compiling or other workload it is fast if not the fastest. So there are plenty of evidence it isn't benchmark specific which some people claims Apple is only fast on Geekbench. The problem is macOS is slow. And for whatever reason haven't improved much. I am hoping dropping support for x86 in next macOS meant they have time and excuses to do a lot of work on macOS under the hood. Especially with OOM and Paging.
I have a ThinkPad besides my main MacBook. I recently switched to KDE, a full desktop environment, and it is just insane how much faster everything renders than on macOS. And that's on a relatively underpowered integrated Ryzen GPU. Window dragging is butter smooth on a 120Hz screen, which I cannot say of macOS (though it outright terrible with the recent Electron issue).
Apple Silicon is awesome and was a game changer when it came out. Still very impressive that they have been able to keep the MacBook Air passively cooled since the first M1. But yeah, macOS is holding it back.
That's just framing. A different wording could be: by moving more work to slow (but power efficient) cores, the other cores (let's call them performance cores) are free to do other stuff.
> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news
Not when one of those decides to wreck havoc - spotlight indexing issues slowly eating away your disk space, icloud sync spinning over and over and hanging any app that tries to read your Documents folder, Photos sync pegging all cores at 100%… it feels like things might be getting a little out of hand. How can anyone model/predict system behaviour with so many moving parts?
for me it’s iMessage, it gets out of sync way too often and then it eats the CPU away
Pretty heavy iMessage user here, but I can't say I experience any issues, and that's probably why your issue is not getting fixed - ie. nobody at Apple is able to reproduce it. Maybe you should gather some info about it and see if you can send a bug report?
fair point, I should — one classic symptom I experience is the emoji picker will make it crash, not load quickly, and if it finishes loading they all appear as empty placeholders (maybe because I have way too many stickers and iCloud sync is tripping? idk)
Sounds like typical Windows experience
and if it paid off, that would almost be acceptable! But no. After spotlight has indexed my /Applications folder, when I hit command-spacebar and type "preview.app", it takes ~4 seconds on my M4 laptop to search the sqlite database for it and return that entry.
grumble
I have the same issue on my M4 Macbook Pro and I had it on my previous M2 Apple Mac Mini, on several macOS versions (pre-Tahoe). I suspect it has to do with the virtual filesystem layer, as I had used OneDrive for Mac and now Proton Drive. Whatever it is, it has been broken for years on several devices and OSes and I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care about it.
On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the “Applications” view (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start, I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications view. The search is instant.
Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files it found on the filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot. Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing that each time required running some arcane commands in the terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac.
But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my solution is gone now.
All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release, crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the only GPU programming option, I think I’m going to be switching back to Linux.
macOS profiling tools completely blow Linux’s perf out of the water. It’s not even close.
https://blog.bugsiki.dev/posts/apple-pmu/
> I quickly found out that Apple Instruments doesn’t support fetching more than 10 counters, sometimes 8, and sometimes less. I was constantly getting errors like '<SOME_COUNTER>' conflicts with a previously added event. The maximum that I could get is 10 counters. So, the first takeaway was that there is a limit to how many counters I can fetch, and another is that counters are, in some way, incompatible with each other. Why and how they’re incompatible is a good question.
You are saying that like perf is Linux only profiling tool.
That’s what they compared to
I may be a spotlight unicorn, but I’ve never seen this behavior people complain about. Spotlight has always been instant for me, since its introduction and I’ve never seen a regression.
It is completely useless on network mounts, however, where I resort to find/grep/rg
On my Intel mac searching with cmd+space for a file takes under a second. Maybe there is a problem on your end?
I’ve actually had worse problems as recently as last week: Apps stopped showing up completely in spotlight.
Only a system reinstall + manually deleting all index files fixed it. Meanwhile it was eating 20-30GB of disk space. There are tons of reports of this in the apple forums.
Even then, it feels a lot slower in MacOS 26 than it did before, and you often get the rug-pull effect of your results changing a millisecond before you press the enter key. I would pay good money to go back to Snow Leopard.
I had the same problem last year, re-indexing all the files fixed it for me[1].
That being said, macOS was definitely more snappy back on Catalina, which was the first version I had so I can't vouch for Snow Leopard. Each update after Catalina felt gradually worse and from what i heard Tahoe feels like the last nail in the coffin.
I hope the UX team will deliver a more polished, expressive and minimal design next time.
[1] - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321
TIL there is a search bar triggered by CMD+Space. After 15 long years.
Too late. Apple has destroyed it.
I just got my first ARM Mac to replace my work Win machine (what has MS done to Windows!?!? :'()
Used to be I could type "display" and Id get right to display settings in settings. Now it shows thousands of useless links to who knows what. Instead I have to type "settings" and then, within settings, type "display"
Still better than the Windows shit show.
Honestly, a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today.
[delayed]
Despite what the sibling comment says, my anecdata is that cmd+space works perfectly fine.
People are really unable to differentiate “I am having issues” and “things are universally or even widely broken”
Genuine question, when people talk about apple silicon being fast, is the comparison to windows intel laptops, or Mac intel architecture?
Because, when running a Linux intel laptop, even with crowd strike and a LOT of corporate ware, there is no slowness.
When blogs talk about "fast" like this I always assumed it was for heavy lifting, such as video editing or AI stuff, not just day to day regular stuff.
I'm confused, is there a speed difference in day to day corporate work between new Macs and new Linux laptops?
Thank you
I use pretty much all platforms and architectures as my "daily drivers" - x64, Apple Silicon, and ARM Cortex, with various mixtures of Linux/Mac/Windows.
When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in performance, and battery life is more variable now.
Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU, GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher memory bandwidth/lower latency.
I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's competitive in the latest generation.
This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever.
My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.
I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.
My work MBP also can drain the battery in a couple hours of light use. But that's because of FireEye / Microsoft Defender. FireEye has a bug where it pegs the CPU at 100% indefinitely and needs to be killed to stop its infinite loop. Defender hates when a git checkout changes 30,000 files and uses up all my battery (but I can't monitor this because I can't view the processes).
It’s always the corporate wares that caused the issues, in my case it’s crowdstrike and zscaler. Even with these wares I can last a full day with my M1 pro, I only notice the battery was drained to 0 once when I went to vacation for a week, it’s never happened before these wares
I didn’t even know Microsoft Defender was a thing on MBPs.
Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.
That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...
> Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage.
Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no OS can manage today.
Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop pcs.
Of course, it's only competitive for short bursts of serious CPU work. The thermal limits do kick in pretty quickly.
(I love my MacBook Air, but it does have its limits.)
I looked into this for the M1 MBA and it had the exact same performance at full load as the MBP...for 7 minutes. Then the thermal throttling hits and it slows down. I'm not sure what the time limit is for newer models. Regardless, the MBA's aren't offered with Pro/Ultra chips, which I desire (and would thermally throttle much sooner than 7 minutes).
My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is entirely based on whether they do anything that will load the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a lot.
0: https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control
I guess the details depend on how warm it is in your room, and whether your MacBook Air sits directly under a fan.
My M1 MacBook Air is honestly the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Still snappy and responsive years after release. Fantastic machine. I’m starting to crave an M5 Air…
Don't let consumerism be stronger than you. An m1 is still sufficiently powerful.
Apple chips are very good especially for their power envelope but let's not get ahead of ourselves, the only way a Macbook Air feels competitive with a top-of-the-line desktop is if you're not actually utilizing the full sustained power of the desktop. There's a reason why Apple sells much bigger Max/Ultra chips with active cooling.
It’s still a lot less active cooling - the MBP fan and fan noise is noticably less than every thinkpad I’ve had, and its perf beats most desktop i7s.
First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.
Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch of design and manufacturing choices.
But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same hardware.
I do believe Apple are still the fastest single-core (M5, A19 Pro, and M3 Ultra leading), which still matters for a shocking amount of my workloads. But only the M5 has any noticeable gap vs Intel (~16%). Also the rankings are a bit gamed because AMD and Intel put out a LOT of SKU's that are nearly the same product, so whenever they're "winning" on a benchmark they take up a bunch of slots right next to eachother even though they're all basically the exact same chip.
Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload still apply, of course.
And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor, but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in multicore benchmarks.
No, the AMD headliners still dominate for single-core performance[1]. Even if you normalize for similar/"same" chips; which really just means you have five cores each generation: AMD's, Intel's, Apple's, and ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-X.
Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.
But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.
1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-benchmarks-2026/
Even at the time of announcement M5 was not the fastest chip. Not even on single core benchmark where apple usually shines due to the design choice of having fewer but more powerful cores (AMD for examples does the opposite). For example on geekbench Core i9-14900KS and Core Ultra 9 285K were faster.
The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.
My windows with corporate crap is sometimes 2000x slower than without corporate crap. And consistently 10x slower than an M3
Don’t worry, my new M4 doesn’t feel much faster either due to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got ported to Mac it’s become terrible in I/O and overall responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire core or two on Defender processes.
My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.
I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now: beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… Reminds me of the bad old days of Win XP.
How much RAM do you have? That seems to be the main thing that slows down my MacBooks (original launch-day 16GB M1 MBP and 32 GB M2 Pro). The M1 CPU is finally starting to show its age for some things, but the M2 Pro is really only RAM limited in perceived speed for me.
RAM. You must have 16 GB or more. And for serious work now, I’m looking at 32 GB or more.
>First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.
You are comparing 256 AMD Zen6c Core to What? M4 Max?
When people say CPU they meant CPU Core, And in terms of Raw Speed, Apple CPU holds the fastest single core CPU benchmarks.
M4 pro 16 cores is #13 among laptops:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html#cpumark
You’re still looking at the multi core score, you want this one:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next MacBook Air) is on top.
When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core charts will be interesting.
My RHEL vnc feels snappier than the Windows 11 client it’s running on.
With maximum corporate spyware it consistently takes 1 second to get a visual feedback on Windows.
> First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest.
The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.
At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].
But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.
[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.
It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.
Of course Apple did pick a very good sweet spot favoring a wide core as opposed to a speed daemon more than the competition.
I don't get your first line. When people talk about Apple's core speeds they're not talking about cycles per instruction or something, they're talking about single-thread performance on a benchmark like Geekbench. Geekbench runs various real-world code and it's the gross throughput that is measured, and it's there that Apple cores shine.
> It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.
That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive. In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider architecture is actually faster than the competition in an absolute sense even at the deployed clock rates. There's really no significant market where you'd want to use anything different for CPU compute anywhere. Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or Zen 5c every time they're measured too.
Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are die size and packaging: their cores take a little more area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings with much higher per-part margins.
Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple to do the same soon.
[1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs are fast enough and have been for years now, and the stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized out of its market space, but then that's true of every premium vendor throughout history.
For laptops at least, I appreciate not having fans that sound like a helicopter. I guess for Mac Mini and Mac Studio having more fan noise is acceptable (maybe a switch would be nice). One of the things that I love about my Air is there is zero fan noise all the time. Yes, it throttles, and 99% of the time I don’t notice and don’t care. Yes, I know there are workloads where it would be very noticeable and I would care, but I don’t personally run too many CPU bound tasks.
Nowhere in the submission or even the comment you replied to did anyone say "fastest". The incredibly weird knee-jerk defensiveness by some is bizarre.
It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying background needs, in this case talking specifically about Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same reason.
New Mac arm user here.
Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb).
Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba mount through our corporate VPN.
- Much faster than my intel Mac
- Faster than my Windows
- Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but with my current job I no longer get to use them much for desktop (unfortunately).
Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just sleeps/wakes up with no problems.
The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery, decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer keypress)
Part of it is that the data pipelines in the Mac are far more efficient with its soldered memory and enhanced buses. You would have to use something like Halo Strix on the PC side see similar performance upticks at a somewhat affordable price bracket. Things like Samba/VPN mounting should not matter much (unless your mac network interface is significantly better), but you might see a general snappiness improvement. Heavy compute tasks will be a give and take with modern PC hardware, but Apple is still the king of efficiency.
I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with virtually no compromises.
I love apple and mainly use one for personal use, but apple users consistently overrate how fast their machines are. I used to see sentiment like "how will nvidia ever catch up with apples unified silicon approach" a few years ago. But if you just try nvidia vs apple and compare on a per dollar level, nvidia is so obviously the winner.
For me it’s things like boot speed. How long does it take to restart the computer. To log out, and log back in with all my apps opening.
Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic functions. (I don’t have real data points)
Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and always responsive.
No idea how that compares to Linux.
Well, completely rebooting is a lot slower on my Macs than on my Linux.
But I'm running a fairly slim Archlinux install without a desktop environment or anything like that. (It's just XMonad as a window manager.)
What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.
Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.
Some of that can be attributed to faster IO.
Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered.
Why? I have no idea.
Hmm? Why do you restart your computer often enough to notice?
Even Windows (or at least my install that doesn't have any crap besides visual studio on it) can run for weeks these days...
I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop review coverage before asking questions like this.
There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions.
Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.
Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.
Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.
Power management with Mac’s is the big benefit, imo.
It’s all about the perf per watt.
Can't Windows/Linux pin background threads to specific cores on Intel too? So that your foreground app isn't slowed down by all the background activity going on? Or there's something else to it that I don't understand. I thought E cores' main advantage is that they use less power which is good for battery life on laptops. But the article makes it sound like main advantage of Apple Silicon is that it splits foreground/background workloads better. Isn't it something that can already be done without a P/E distinction?
Yes, it's the job of the scheduler
Linux yes, of course.
These processors are good all around. The P cores kick butt too.
I ran a performance test back in October comparing M4 laptops against high-end Windows desktops, and the results showed the M-series chips coming out on top.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...
This is likely more of a Windows filesystem benchmark than anything else: there are fundamental restrictions on how fast file access can be on Windows due to filesystem filter drivers. I would bet that if you tried again with Linux (or even in WSL2, as long as you stay in the WSL filesystem image), you'd see significantly improved results.
Which still wouldn’t beat the Apple Silicon chips. Apple rules the roost.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
From your article it seems like you benchmark compile times. I am not an expert on the subject, but I don't see the point in comparing ARM compilation times with Intel. There are probably different tricks involved in compilation and the instructions set are not the same.
Here is a more recent comparison with Intel's new Panther Lake chips: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/cpus/panther-lake-is-int...
Are the Intel systems plugged in when running those tests? Usually when Apple machines do the tests then the difference between battery/plugged in is small if any.
Does anyone have any insight into the MacOS scheduler and the algorithm it uses to place threads on E vs. P cores? Is it as simple as noting whether a thread was last suspended blocking on I/O or for a time slice timeout and mapping I/O blockers to E cores and time slice blockers to P cores? Or does the programmer indicate a static mapping at thread creation? I write code on a Mac all the time, but I use Clojure and all the low level OS decisions are opaque to me.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/110147/
Excellent, thanks!
Check out the scheduler documentation that Apple has in the xnu repo. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/main/doc...
The baseline is static: low QoS tasks are dispatched to the E cores, while high QoS tasks are dispatched to P cores. IIRC high QoS cores can migrate to the E cores if all P cores are loaded, but my understanding is that the lowest QoS tasks (background) never get promoted to P cores.
How is the QoS communicated to the scheduler? Is there a mark on the binary or does the code do it at thread startup?
The Apple software stack makes heavy use of thread pools via libdispatch. Individual work items are tagged with QoS, which influences which thread picks up the work item from the queue.
It’s done in code.
The article mentions P or E is generally decided by if it's a "background" process (whatever than means). Possible some (undocumented) designation in code or directive to the compiler of the binary decides this at compile time.
> whatever than means
It’s a QoS level: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/dispatch/dispatchq...
> Admittedly the impression isn’t helped by a dreadful piece of psychology, as those E cores at 100% are probably running at a frequency a quarter of those of P cores shown at the same 100%
It’s about half, actually
> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news
I mean, only if they’re doing something useful
My M2 MBA doesn't have a fan but literally smokes the majority on Intel systems which are space heaters this time of year. Those legacy x86 apps don't really exist for the majority of people anymore.
>If you use an Apple silicon Mac I’m sure you have been impressed by its performance.
This article couldn't have come at a better time. Because frankly speaking I am not that impressed after I tested Omarchy Linux. Everything was snappy. It is like back to DOS or Windows 3.11 era. ( Not quite but close ) It makes me wonder why Mac couldn't be like that.
Apple Silicon is fast, no doubt about it. It isn't some benchmarks but even under emulation, compiling or other workload it is fast if not the fastest. So there are plenty of evidence it isn't benchmark specific which some people claims Apple is only fast on Geekbench. The problem is macOS is slow. And for whatever reason haven't improved much. I am hoping dropping support for x86 in next macOS meant they have time and excuses to do a lot of work on macOS under the hood. Especially with OOM and Paging.
I have a ThinkPad besides my main MacBook. I recently switched to KDE, a full desktop environment, and it is just insane how much faster everything renders than on macOS. And that's on a relatively underpowered integrated Ryzen GPU. Window dragging is butter smooth on a 120Hz screen, which I cannot say of macOS (though it outright terrible with the recent Electron issue).
Apple Silicon is awesome and was a game changer when it came out. Still very impressive that they have been able to keep the MacBook Air passively cooled since the first M1. But yeah, macOS is holding it back.
That's just framing. A different wording could be: by moving more work to slow (but power efficient) cores, the other cores (let's call them performance cores) are free to do other stuff.