i’m a senior in college and for the past 3 years i’ve used a 2020 13” inch macbook pro. it was amazing and did everything i needed for university and then some. last year i spilled some water on it and it stopped working completely it made more financial sense to get a new computer than to pay the price they wanted to fix it. so it’s bricked essentially. i got a m2 macbook air as a replacement after hearing such good things about it. it is genuinely the worst machine i’ve ever used and it makes it near imposssible to do do work. nothing loads from webpages to programs and i can’t deal with it anymore. my course load requires using adobe suite and i can’t do that on here reliably. i’m at a crossroad because i spent $1700 on the computer and apple care for 3 years. i’m planning on selling the m2 air and fixing the pro but i’m really stuck and would love some advice. or does it make sense to invest in an m3 a pro as a method of future proofing. any advice would be greatly appreciated
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Sounds like there is something defective about your mac. Have you done a clean restore and tested it?
I have the 15 MacBook Air base model. Great computer. I like it more than my 2020 MacBook Pro 13 16gb/512.
The problem is with you or your particular MacBook. Not MacBook m2 in general
I recently upgraded from the M1 Pro max to the M3 pro Max, and I had some really weird issues as well—on particular with the Adobe Suite. I still don’t know what caused it, but I deleted all my apps and reinstalled them, and it fixed everything.
For everyone saying the computer has a fault, this just happened to me as well I couldn’t have safari, slack, and miro open doing a call on slack with screen share it froze up and got warm. Looks like a consistent flaw I’ve heard some say it just can’t handle multitasking even with 24gb ram. Also hearing what you’re saying that it’s a flawed device to go and get it checked. At this point honestly don’t know what the answer is. Anyone have an MBA that IS able to run heavier software and isn’t dealing with freezing?
Who installed your Adobe suite in your computer? To me it sounds that it’s an old version that it’s running in the compatibility layer rather than the apple silicon version .
Personally I agree the newer Macbooks are a huge step down in quality. Fast/light isn’t worth much when it won’t connect to wifi 40% of the time without restarting. Yes I’ve updated everything.
I used to run adobe photoshop and after effects along with study notes app and forgot to close Minecraft on the background and it runes flawlessly , and thats M1 Air 8gb ram
If you have 8gb ram and your ssd is full it will get really slow. No room for swap. You must leave free space in your internal drive. Which is why I recommend anyone doing creative work to just get a 14” pro. Even M1 Pro with 16gb ram.
You shouldn’t be having noticable issues with a machine with these specs if everything is running correctly. It should be damn smooth and fast in fact. You might have a hung app or process running and chewing up resources. Have you opened activity monitor to check for anything eating up a lot of CPU or RAM? Have you tried the PRAM reset process? Do them both. Also shut down machine. Press and HOLD The power button until it says it’s booting into diagnostics mode , (can’t remember the exact verbiage) then when in that mode open disk utility from the menu bar… Run disk first aid in the actual SSD AND the volume. (Make sure in disk first aid that the pull down says show all volumes,). Hope this makes sense… If it doesn’t show it had issues and the PRAM reset process doesn’t help then take it to Apple because this machine should definitely not be feeling noticeably slow, even in light to medium Photoshop type stuff it should do pretty well. It sounds like something is stuck in memory or there’s a factory issue that needs resolved because wow this is not a workhorse machine, with that M2 processor you should still be able to do some pretty productive high to medium high type workload without it feeling super sluggish like you said it is. That definitely does not sound right at all. And you have AppleCare so it shouldn’t cost much if anything for Apple to diagnose it and fix it. At worst case maybe a small copay of 50 bucks or whatever but you should be able to run Photoshop and illustrator and whatnot on that M2 air just fine. Even some high-end work should be doable without feeling too much of a slowing down. Have you installed malwarebytes for Mac and ran it? Max can and do get malware quite often now so you could have some malware even so it wouldn’t hurt to try that either
this post feels wrong, but provided your nice enough with the folks over at your local apple store, they should be able to get you a completely new computer if your lucky, and if your not lucky, hope the diagnostics they do behind the board make you lucky.
Something must be wrong with your machine. It shouldn’t have a single issue with the tasks you described. I strongly recommend taking it to an Apple Store to see if they can help.
I have M1 Macbook Air and I had it for two years now. It works really well and lasts me through the day with light work along with heavy use from day to day. Something doesn’t seem to be right with the M2 MBA. Better check it out before regretting it further.
Perhaps pirated software with a virus.
Maybe you have a virus, I have no issues with mine.