@nateg If you haven’t already done this, may I suggest a clean install of Monterey, without using Migration Assistant to restore your apps and home folder? Instead, reinstall just the apps you need, and perhaps recover their settings files from a backup.
This is tedious, to be sure, but it ought to work and it won’t cost you anything apart from time – and may not take longer than troubleshooting individual apps. You already have an SSD, and as @randy2 said, if your Mac has previously been OK then it ought to work with Monterey.
I bought my Mac mini M1 only just over a year ago, but still, a clean install the other day fixed a whole bunch of small weirdnesses. Whenever I do this I always find loads of apps and settings I no longer need. Not reinstalling them makes me feel a whole lot better, even if it only rarely improves the performance of the Mac.
Randy,
Thanks for your input on that topic string. My 27" iMac late 2015 with 1g GB RAM and a 2 TB Fusion Drive started to get amazingly slow. The transition to molasses happened over a month or two. No new software of significance, I’d upgraded to Monterey at least 5 months before. Since I’ve had the computer for almost 6 years, I thought it was the usual issue of built-in obsolescence with Macs --I expect to have to buy a new one every 3-5 years. After all, the functionality increases over time and I always upgrade to a new OS to get these newer functions relatively soon after release. I’m okay with paying for improved hardware/software.
But my note to you is to thank you for putting out your message to test, tweak, and tinker before bailing out. I had been about to buy a new M1 computer of some kind but was sad to be facing a choice of giving up my 27 inches or shelling out a lot of $$ for the new configurations to get the larger display. With a radical trashing and transferring of unneeded files to free up disk space, using Activity Monitor to assess and get rid of software that might be mucking things up, rebuilding the spotlight database, running Disk Utility a few times–it’s running much better!! I can delay purchasing a new Mac–even purchasing a new SSD. Of course most of these remedies are basic and well documented, but you helped me gather the will to spend a few hours to try out a fix and it paid off.
you helped me gather the will to spend a few hours to try out a fix and it paid off.
Thank you for writing! I’ve found that the vast majority of slowdowns can be reversed. Most folks want to just throw up their hands in frustration, or are easily convinced that expensive hardware upgrades are necessary. But usually it isn’t hard to reverse the problem.
It IS true that if you upgrade your OS and your internal RDHD or Fusion drive is automatically re-formatted to APFS, you will see a noticeable slowdown that can’t be reversed easily. Also, if you fill up your hard drive, Fusion drive, or SSD, it’s going to be hard to reverse the slowdown that causes, sometimes even if you clear off a lot of space. I have to update my Slowdown Solutions Web site to include the above.
Might you have a “split” Fusion Drive or the same problem as one even on an SSD? (If you are absolutely sure your drive isn’t “split”, please disregard the rest of this post.)
Just a couple of months ago I had exactly the same problem with my iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017) with the Fusion Drive. It was fast, then it wasn’t.
Apple Support couldn’t help, and things when awry when I followed their advice (no one at Apple Support thought to check their Knowledge Base for what happens to Fusion Drives, it seems). Erasing and reformatting, then restoring, created new problems while not fixing the old ones. Mike Bombich and his Carbon Copy Cloner saved me. Mike gave me some tips and hints… one of them was a mysterious comment about my Fusion Drive being “split”, which led me to poke around a bit.
Then I found this, made sure my Carbon Copy Cloner backups were all sync’d (thanks, Mike!), did what it said precisely (indeed, my Fusion Drive was split), and now all is well – and fast – again:
How to fix a split Fusion Drive
(My wife wisely said – “If Apple knew this was a problem, why didn’t the macOS simply offer to fix it?”)
First you check if it is split. If it is, you fix it. If it’s not – then I keep on working with our TidBITS Talk colleagues. But I’m guessing you’re going to fix it.
Let me know how it goes. And if it works, please thank Mike!
