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MacOS 10.15: Slow by Design (2020)
- gjvc 4y agoThe peak was 10.6 / Snow Leopard.
- b0afc375b5 4y agoOh wow I thought it was just zsh being awfully slow. Does this issue still exist in subsequent mac os versions? (Big Sur, Monterey)
- classified 4y agoYes, Monterey is even worse.
- mshockwave 4y agoI think you should add 2020 in the title
- aurora72 4y agoAnyone using macOS will surely guess the time period. No need to add it in the title.
- karottenreibe 4y agoI'm not using it but still interested and would have appreciated the year in the title.
- sergiomattei 4y agomacOS user (and fan) since Mountain Lion. Got confused because of the title.
- Razengan 4y agoThat won’t generate the customary outrage before every new Apple release.
- ajmurmann 4y agoMight be valuable to call out in title here that this is from 2020
- ars 4y agoThe question is has anything changed.
- f1shy 4y agoThe reported problems were fixed in minors revisions afterwards
- lupinglade 4y agoThe app launch delays still occur when the internet connection is slow or lossy even in Ventura beta.
- newaccount74 4y agoDo you have a source on that? If I recall correctly one of the main problems mentioned in the article are synchronous security checks, and as far as I can tell these are still an issue. First time launches of apps still cause random delays, I just experienced them with macOS Ventura beta. And if you don't add Terminal to the developer tools in Security preferences you still get slow performance for scripts.
- mike_hearn 4y agoGatekeeper will still call out to Apple servers if the app doesn't have a stapled notarization ticket in it. However, basically any app released in the last few years will have such a ticket, so you shouldn't experience such delays unless you happen to use a lot of unmaintained or unsigned apps. The server polls are a backwards compatibility fallback.
- lapcat 4y ago> The server polls are a backwards compatibility fallback. This is not true. Gatekeeper will phone home regardless. The stapled notarization tickets are actually the fallback, in case the server check fails for some reason, such as no internet connection. Remember that notarization tickets can be revoked by Apple! In fact, security researchers have found many instances of notarized malware. Notarization is no guarantee against malware. A notarization ticket just says that the app was validly signed, and that Apple checked the app for malware at the time and didn't find any. At the time. Malware checks are improved. Malware is found after the fact.
- stevewatson301 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247
- bmitc 4y agoWhat a nightmare. My previous two jobs had me use macOS, specifically Macbook Pros, and it was a nightmare. Slow, difficult to even use the computer due to all sorts of hidden behaviors and blocks, and a terrible mess when it came to my external monitor, webcam, keyboard, and mouse (from major brands in Dell and Logitech). I got to choose for my new job and chose Windows, and it's night and day in terms of productivity.
- wodenokoto 4y agoyeah yeah yeah. My job forced me to use Windows, and it is terrible for my productivity and what not. One day, one of the screens stopped working when in use with dual display another day the fingerprint reader stopped working for log-ins, but still works for the first half of setting up a new fingerprint. I can't even charge my headphones without special drivers! Look. We all have our pet peeves with OSs, but they are not relevant to TFA
- dereg 4y agoFor all intents and purposes, a M-Series MacBook running Parallels is the best Windows laptop you can buy. I say this as a Windows productivity maximalist. It’s 2022 and Windows touchpads and touchpad drivers don’t hold a candle to my 2011 MacBook.
- political12345 4y ago
- fredsted 4y agoUsing a mouse for an extended period makes my hand hurt
- yurishimo 4y agoI’m not a designer. I use a trackpad full time, even on desktop (on macOS). For me, it’s a couple of things. First, gestures are awesome and not easily reproducible with a mouse. My keyboard is full of shortcuts for other things, I don’t want to take up hotkeys for something my trackpad can do. Second, it’s consistent across all my computing devices. My laptop experience is identical to the desktop experience and I don’t have to carry a mouse in my backpack for my laptop. Finally, my hands are closer, and on the same plane, as my keyboard. With a mouse, my hand has to move from a small claw shape back to flat for typing. With a trackpad, my hand stays flatter. Bonus, I need less space for computing. I know you can adjust the sensitivity for mice, and even for trackpads, but in practice, for me personally, I tend to need way more space when using a mouse. I still play computer games so it’s not like I don’t own one, but for productivity, I’ll use a trackpad when possible.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago> I would strongly recommend anyone who thinks their system is sluggish to [disable SIP] I’m very glad this advice has been as niche as it has been. It’s awful advice unless you really know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Anyway, I still run 10.15 daily and the only thing that I’d call slow by design is the thermal design of the laptop it runs on. Even so I think just thoroughly clearing dust out of it gave it at least another few more years of being a pretty decent laptop.
- capableweb 4y agoThat is truly horrible advice, particularly since the tradeoff is not being mentioned at all, or otherwise what the implications are. However, seems SIP can only be disabled temporarily (until next reboot?), at least according to https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling_and_enabling_system_integrity_protection https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling... but it's unclear for how long it is disabled.
- comex 4y agoIt's disabled until you manually re-enable it. That documentation page's wording suggests otherwise, but that seems to just be an artifact of trying to really hammer in the advice that you should only keep it disabled temporarily.
- zarzavat 4y agoWhy is it horrible advice? It’s equivalent to telling someone to use Linux, which doesn’t have SIP either. SIP is personal preference. Personally I find that Mac OS is too buggy with SIP enabled. I had an issue where disk space was disappearing into a directory that was hidden by SIP, because the OS was leaking update images.
- Closi 4y ago> Why is it horrible advice? It’s equivalent to telling someone to use Linux, which doesn’t have SIP either. These two OS’s have very different types of user and attacker (speaking in generalities), and thus different security trade-offs during design. The main risk with Mac is that someone downloads a “Mac cleaner” or something similar which installs malware, or that malware is hidden in a legitimate looking app, and this is what SIP protects against. Even informed power users can make these mistakes - it only takes downloading one compromised utility! IMO for most ‘home’ use where it is used as a main OS by a person without too much familiarity with computers, Ubuntu and many Linux distros are probably less secure than Mac - for instance the average user is conditioned to run random terminal commands they find on the internet and give them sudo permission. Obviously I’m excluding the majority of use-cases such as routers, consoles, tvs, servers where users access to the underlying OS is heavily restricted.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- buildbot 4y agoI like how most of the things that slow things down are actually really nice and important security features that you should keep enabled for the normal user. This article feels like a blog from 2007 recommending ccleaner to “speed” up windows. Is the macos perfect? No. But it works a lot better than Windows in my experience. Anti malware service, everyone is looking at you.
- hulitu 4y ago> are actually really nice and important security features I don't underestand how Apple getting a list of everything i run is "security". But everybody is doing it (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook) so it must be good.
- asdff 4y agoIt's not like users were getting pwned left and right on mojave.
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y agoHas this been fixed?
- newaccount74 4y agoNo.
- political12345 4y agoit's by design, hence a feature, hence cannot and would not be fixed. expect more to come, probably some captchas
- simonh 4y agoWhy do you expect them to add captchas?
- x-complexity 4y ago
- denkmoon 4y agoThis wasn't a stupid comment until the bit about captchas.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- daneel_w 4y agoIn my experience it has at the very least been notably reduced. See my other comment in this thread about the root cause.
- dhsysusbsjsi 4y agoI remember reading an article once where they said SIP sends the hash of the application in the clear. This allows your ISP to track known application hashes you have installed. Unsure if this is still accurate.
- political12345 4y agothey must surely be salting it, tou would expect at least some first year comp sci knowledge from a 1 trilion dollar "megacorn"
- sneak 4y agoIt was probably my website you saw. It does, but it is the hash of the developer’s certificate. For most developers, this uniquely identifies the single application they publish. If you launch a unique constellation of apps then it uniquely identifies your machine. Apple committed to sending this OCSP check not in plaintext within a year, but that was more than a year ago.
- lapcat 4y ago> Apple committed to sending this OCSP check not in plaintext within a year, but that was more than a year ago. This part has been accomplished. However, Apple has reneged on the opt out user preference. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/ocsp-privacy.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/ocsp-privacy.html
- political12345 4y ago
- sharikous 4y agoThe wonderful news is that Ventura implements the checks at every run, not only when the file changes, see: https://eclecticlight.co/2022/06/17/app-security-changes-coming-in-ventura/ https://eclecticlight.co/2022/06/17/app-security-changes-com... Those interested to block the check should look at this list : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210060 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210060 and block the IPs associated with notarization. It is possible to do that with pf, which is integrated in macOS but it should be done after every update since the pf.conf file will get overwritten.
- sph 4y agoWhy is a file checked every run? A binary of hash X still has the same instructions as yesterday, if the hash is unchanged.
- Someone 4y agoThe only sure way to know the hash didn’t change is by recomputing it. File modification dates can be faked.
- sph 4y agoWith control over the whole stack like Apple has, it might be easier to just store a bit on the file system level after checking a binary, and if the file is modified, to reset it. But I guess with how fast computers and storage is today, it's probably easier to recompute the hash every run. My desktop can do SHA-512 at 1 GB/s (`openssl speed sha512`), which is fast enough to be imperceptible for 99% of binaries. Anyway, I thought OP meant Ventura sends the hash to Apple's server every run. That would be far too expensive to be reasonable.
- solarkraft 4y agoThey do have a "quarantine bit" that prevents unsigned binaries downloaded from the internet (?) from running.
- 4y ago
- trustingtrust 4y agoIs this why my iOS devices have been running smoother since I changed my isp to something much better ? I used to have issues with all my ios devices where they just felt sluggish in general doing non internet related tasks too. Now that I have upgraded my ISP everything is just snappier. Just launching apps is faster. This isn’t the first time this transition has happened for me. I’ve been moving a lot last few years and different places have different quality isps. Every time I have a good isp all my apple devices feel better.
- samoit 4y agoJust my grain of salt but None should use an OS that controls/restricts the user that way. It is not right. Use Linux/freebsd if possible
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoIt doesn't restrict, it protects at a performance cost. The vast majority of users won't notice, since they don't start apps very often. We've seen what happens when average users get an operating system that doesn't protect them; Windows XP was an interesting time.
- RobertWHurst 4y agoI simply do not want my computer sending signatures of anything on my disks to apple's servers. They can f*k right off. So glad I switched off Mac.
- daneel_w 4y agoIt's not underlined in the article, but for anyone who didn't follow this issue while it peaked: the root cause was (still is?) a notable delay when contacting Apple's servers to enquire about fingerprints of an executable that was about to launch, for anti-malware purposes. There were loads of reports that the problem disappeared entirely by just disabling Internet access, an obviously unideal solution.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThe article is a bit misleading I think, since the check only happens on startup; a lot of people won't start up new apps on the regular. Developers probably do though.
- daneel_w 4y agoAnother observation that went missing from the discussions around this problem is that it pans out differently (worse) for people in North America than it does for European users. Apple's various CDNs are far from equally encumbered. Reports from North American users held numbers well beyond those reported by European users. For me here in Sweden the problem was at its peak no more than a lesser annoyance. Not once did I observe anything near the dredging 5-30 second delays that North American users reported, and the recurring 2-3 seconds long system freezes never manifested for me at all.
- jscheel 4y agoWhen I upgraded my fully maxed-out 2019 16" mbp from Catalina to Monteray, the every-day performance of my computer took an absolute nose-dive. It's been a complete nightmare, and has significantly soured me on Apple. Right now, the biggest lingering issue is that if my laptop is on the integrated gfx card, typing performance is so laggy that it's excruciating to type anything. So far, the only response has been to just disable automatic graphics switching, meaning battery life is reduced by about 3-4x. It's just unbelievable how bad this has become. I spent hours with an Apple senior support engineer (or whatever they are called), and all he could do is go "dang that _is_ bad, I'll file a bug." Yet the problem still persists.
- avidphantasm 4y agoMy maxed-out 2019 16" MBP was always a dog. The 2016-2019 Intel MBPs suffered from an inability to cool themselves (esp. with dual external displays) and were just overly complex. I think the combination of the Intel CPU, discrete GPU, and T1/T2 controller just made for an overly complex and crash prone system. Mine had this weird issue where touchpad and keyboard input would periodically experience some kind of deadlock. I could trigger this using the calculator app. Enter 42, +, 23, and press =. The results would not show up until I would move the mouse or tap a key on the keyboard. I traded the 2019 MBP for a 14" M1 Pro as soon as I could and haven't looked back. This machine is great.
- jscheel 4y agoYeah, I think I'll upgrade when the next ones come out, just not looking forward to the massive hit I'm gonna take when reselling this one.
- 1123581321 4y agoHopefully they can fix it. I had that model for work (the i7, though) and it was better for me but it still greatly struggled with heat management with a normal office workload (video call, editor, some documents, browser.) The corollary is that macOS’ increasing reliance on GPU all over the system is really nice on Apple Silicon, where they don’t need to make such a stark trade-off between GPU power and battery, and can scale usage smoothly.
- grishka 4y agoThe component responsible for all the notarization nonsense and entitlements enforcement is not SIP, it's AMFI. You can disable it too with a kernel argument, I don't remember it exactly but it's something like "--amfi-get-out-of-my-way". This will reduce the security of your system approximately to that of Windows.
- RobertWHurst 4y agoThis is getting stupid now. I don't care what it's for, I want to make this very clear for anyone at Apple, so read this next bit aloud ok; I DO NOT WANT YOU TO SEND ANYTHING ON MY COMPUTER TO YOUR F***G SERVERS. As a professional, I will never buy a Mac with will refuse to use one for work so long as this walled garden horseshit continues. I'm not against signature protection, but it should be entirely local. You don't need to know what is on my computer or what I'm doing with it.