For around a year now, my 2018 MBP has been running like a dog. The fan spins constantly, the laptop is too hot to touch, opening more than 6 tabs in Safari would grind the machine to a halt and I'd only get around 2 hours of battery life.
Somewhat convinced there's a hardware fault, I took it to my local Genius bar, they checked it and said all was well, but they reinstalled the OS and said the machine passed all their diagnostic checks.
But the performance issues and overheating persisted. So I wiped it and reinstalled apps as I needed them.
This helped for a while, but sure enough, the issues came back.
It's been a year of this. Multiple trips to different Apple stores. Multiple reinstalls etc. Eventually, Apple offered to do a deep inspection and I had to leave them my MacBook for a week.
The conclusion: My AV software was causing all the issues.
I removed it and holy crap: It's running like a new machine. I haven't heard the fan spin since Friday (when I removed Sophos). I'm getting an easy 6 hours from the battery, and it's cold. It never heats up: I can actually have my laptop on my lap!
However, this morning my company flagged I had no AV, so due to policy, I had to install BitDefender. And all those issues are back.
So my conclusion: AV on Mac is a device killer (granted this is only a test sample of 2...).
For those of you who run AV, is it affecting your machines? Are you getting persistent running from the fan? Are they overheating? Are you getting spinning beach balls if you open multiple tabs in Safari? How is your battery life? And what AV are you running?
Somewhat convinced there's a hardware fault, I took it to my local Genius bar, they checked it and said all was well, but they reinstalled the OS and said the machine passed all their diagnostic checks.
But the performance issues and overheating persisted. So I wiped it and reinstalled apps as I needed them.
This helped for a while, but sure enough, the issues came back.
It's been a year of this. Multiple trips to different Apple stores. Multiple reinstalls etc. Eventually, Apple offered to do a deep inspection and I had to leave them my MacBook for a week.
The conclusion: My AV software was causing all the issues.
I removed it and holy crap: It's running like a new machine. I haven't heard the fan spin since Friday (when I removed Sophos). I'm getting an easy 6 hours from the battery, and it's cold. It never heats up: I can actually have my laptop on my lap!
However, this morning my company flagged I had no AV, so due to policy, I had to install BitDefender. And all those issues are back.
So my conclusion: AV on Mac is a device killer (granted this is only a test sample of 2...).
For those of you who run AV, is it affecting your machines? Are you getting persistent running from the fan? Are they overheating? Are you getting spinning beach balls if you open multiple tabs in Safari? How is your battery life? And what AV are you running?