Diagnose a Mac problem?

[Sam Inglis]

My other half has a 2013 MacBook Air which has done good service, but has become incredibly slow and I can't figure out why.

This morning it was taking ages to do the simplest things, even though there were only three apps open: Mail, Firefox and MS Word. Activity Monitor showed the CPU running at something like 85 percent idle, and plenty of free memory. There is adequate space on the drive and it's an SSD so fragmentation shouldn't be an issue.

I have tried the usual things like resetting the parameter RAM, but it doesn't seem to make much difference.

Any idea what might be up with it?

[muzines]

Does it behave the same after a reboot?

[Kwackman]

Long shot, it wouldn't be updating automatically in the background? Big Sur is just out?

[Sam Inglis]

Rebooting makes no difference, and no, I don't think it's updating in the background -- this is an issue that has been apparent for a while.

[ManFromGlass]

Time for Disk Warrior?

[muzines]

Not if it’s running APFS!

[paddy2424]

Hi Sam,

You may have already tried, but I think Mac’s disk utility has a means to test the hard drive (and pretty sure it has a repair function too). Might be worth a shot.

Good luck and let us know how you get on - could be useful info for future reference.

[FirstTiger]

Apparently the release of Big Sur has caused all kinds of issues with Apple's servers, which in turn causes all kinds of odd issues with Mac laptops and desktops. Might be entirely unrelated, but worth bearing in mind. What happens if you disable the network?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/13/ ... s_big_sur/

[Matt Houghton]

A couple of unlikely bit possible causes...

Mail once brought my old 2011 MBP to an almost-standstill. I ditched Mail and all was well again.

Another culprit on my 2013 MBP turned out to be a (known by Apple!) problem with the graphics accelerator. The one on the built in Intel chip worked fine, but the Nvidia one was not behaving. I use GFXstatus to turn it off and that helped. But some apps, notably Firefox overrode those settings and tried to use the accelerator anyway... things slowed to a crawl, fans fired up and eventually the computer started crashing often. I limped on with that system for a couple of years, but had to make sure I used apps that didn't try to access the accelerator.

Are there any other services running in the background? Eg Dropbox syncing, Adobe CC and so forth? You should be able to see in the activity monitor what processes are consuming most power/CPU/RAM etc...

[Stonehousestudio]

Create a 'new user' and then boot into this account, as it gives you a fresh set of OS settings. Then you can work out if it is OS related, as in your main account is having issues, or a perhaps a hardware issue.

Plenty of ways to test hardware, but I'd get Apple to check it remotely by using their Apple Support page, or if you have an iOS app, you can book a remote appointment quickly using that instead. I'd go for the later option, as it is easier to set up a time.

If the new user is also slow, then it may be better to do an up to date back up of the data, then do a fresh install of the OS. Don't use the Time Machine backup to set the machine up again, as it will just bring the issue back over.

Instead do a new OS install and manually download/bring over your apps/files.

[Tomás Mulcahy]

My 2012 MBP was very slow... turned out a hair had found its way onto the SATA connector when I installed a new SSD.