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Why is MacOS Ventura making my 2020 intel macbook air run so slowly?


The image is my current setup. Upgraded to macOS Ventura yesterday night. Today I sit down to start working and all of sudden I see my Mac is acting very sluggish. Drop-downs, mouse pointer, window switching, and more all take a crazy amount of time to open or move and do so in a staggered motion.


I opened activity monitor to figure out what was using so many resources and found that several processes that I've never seen before are eating up CPU % like crazy. Sometimes well over 100% for a sustain amount of time.


Is there anyone else experiencing this?


Side note: After Apple released its own silicon I knew I would have to upgrade again, but I didn't think it would be this soon. Usually I can work with a computer for 4-5 years before feeling like I have to upgrade to a newer model. Is this Apple's way of making even more money? By essentially "forcing" us to upgrade every year (like the iPhone) by intentionally making processes run slower on x86 models.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.0

Posted on Oct 27, 2022 8:54 AM

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Posted on Oct 27, 2022 9:16 AM

Noticed many lags too. My Macbook Air (2019) - 8 GB RAM even crashes frequently with kernel panic errors, sometimes directly after I boot, then it won’t turn on for several minutes. When I’m finally able to login I am welcomed by black screens / freezes / mosaics, sometimes faster, sometimes after ~30 minutes. All of that started after I upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey. Hoped to fix it with upgrading to Ventura, since 2019 Macbook Airs are officially supported but it didn’t help. It got even worse. Now I’m trying to downgrade back to Big Sur and I’m confident it will fix my issues. I suspect Apple is intentionally making the new macOS’s more resource intensive so that older devices slow down or stop working altogether. I think they're also purposely not optimizing anything for Intel processors anymore to get people to buy a new M1 or M2 Mac. If my suspicions prove correct and the problems no longer occur under Big Sur, indicating that this is not a hardware but software issue, this will be my last Mac. The release of Monterey was 1 year ago, and thus I expect the operating system to still run stably on a device from 2019.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 27, 2022 9:16 AM in response to thehammerofdoun

Noticed many lags too. My Macbook Air (2019) - 8 GB RAM even crashes frequently with kernel panic errors, sometimes directly after I boot, then it won’t turn on for several minutes. When I’m finally able to login I am welcomed by black screens / freezes / mosaics, sometimes faster, sometimes after ~30 minutes. All of that started after I upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey. Hoped to fix it with upgrading to Ventura, since 2019 Macbook Airs are officially supported but it didn’t help. It got even worse. Now I’m trying to downgrade back to Big Sur and I’m confident it will fix my issues. I suspect Apple is intentionally making the new macOS’s more resource intensive so that older devices slow down or stop working altogether. I think they're also purposely not optimizing anything for Intel processors anymore to get people to buy a new M1 or M2 Mac. If my suspicions prove correct and the problems no longer occur under Big Sur, indicating that this is not a hardware but software issue, this will be my last Mac. The release of Monterey was 1 year ago, and thus I expect the operating system to still run stably on a device from 2019.

Oct 27, 2022 9:30 AM in response to neraldor

If reverting to Monterey gets rid of all the issues I’m dealing with now works this will also be my last Mac Laptop. And in all honesty, I find the actual computers to be less and less relevant in the apple ecosystem. I can use my iPhone, iPad and Apple TV to do anything ecosystem related (i.e. HomeKit). So it wouldn’t be such a big loss tbh.

Why is MacOS Ventura making my 2020 intel macbook air run so slowly?

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