brand new 13” M5 MBA. 1tb hard drive. up-to-date everything. Scriv 3.5.2
basic functions bring up the beach ball; this is happening repeatedly. highlight a word: beach ball. start a new document (page): beach ball. cut & paste: beach ball. over and over and over.
once i’m typing, it’s mostly fine, but something like cmnd-I takes about 2 seconds. pretty stunning that a machine far more powerful than my M2 MBA is this laggy. i hope this is a known issue & soon to be fixed. given that Scriv is built on Mac core ingredients, this should not be going on.
added a bit later: actually, the lagginess is pretty severe at times. i’ll start a new line, blick cmnd-B for bold – and wait several seconds. it seems everything i do that isn’t straight typing of words causes lag & beach ball.
I just set Scrivener 3.5.2 up on my new 15-inch M5 MacBook Air today as well and haven’t noticed any laggy behavior like this at all (so far). I haven’t installed any themes as of yet.
Not a fan of the glassy-looking Tahoe OS though (my M4 iMac is still running Sequoia, which I prefer). But, with this being an M5 chip, it can’t be downgraded, so I’ll have to find ways to tone it down.
FWIW, in my experience new Macs are always laggy at the outset. They are busy-busy doing something. I assume it is because I have ported all my stuff from a previous machine and a bunch of something or other needs to be done or moved around (defraging? encrypting the new drive? I don’t know what).
whoa. turned off AI, and the lag appears to be gone. not sure what Scriv is doing with AI, but it should stop. hopefully this is the answer i needed. i only gave it a small test for now.
Can’t say for sure, but my strong hunch is Scrivener is doing nothing with AI in macOS. It’s your Apple macOS doing something for itself or other apps. macOS is a powerful operating system doing things in background. Probably the experts in other macOS internet forums may know.
Mostly rebuilding Spotlight indexes and the like (the maintenance stuff that is otherwise supposed to happen when your Mac “sleeps”). And also nothing is cached at this point. FileVault and Time Machine should have no noticable impact, worst case they just take (much) longer to complete, especially TM backups.
More useless infodump...
Defragging solid state storage is a horrible idea, so if a “new Mac” comes with a hard drive that would benefit from defragmentation, something else went terribly wrong. Likely on eBay or that dark alley where the purchase happened.
Just old-think on my part, no doubt. Once upon a moon, I taught a course in operating systems design – in a day when DOS was still an acronym for something. How quaint my lecture notes would seem now.
Scrivener includes the hooks to Apple’s Intelligence features. We don’t ourselves “do” anything with AI, but we don’t block the operating system, either.
More generally, anything that “watches” everything you type represents a potential performance issue. That used to mean grammar checkers and text expanders, but resident AI tools most definitely belong on the same list.
another 2 months of use, including on Mobal esim in Japan. no question: laggy.
i don’t use Apple AI; it’s off & Siri is off. i don’t have a bunch of third-party apps/utilities. my wifi is fine. everything is. up-to-date. my Spotlight isn’t being rebuilt.
this is a 3-month old M5 MBA with 24gb ram & 1T internal.
this morning, i tried it in Safe Mode. the lag was gone. rebooted normal; every action takes 1-2 seconds. and i mean every action: File menu, select a word, click on Italic, move the cursor; you name it, it lags. backspace delete.
i cannot believe i have the one M5 MBA on which the only app that doesn’t work is Scrivener. Pixelmator Pro, browsers, Numbers, Pages, Music, Apple TV, even FCP: none of them lag. i’ve been using Scrivener from its inception, and this is not ok.
If Safe Mode fixes the problem, then you have something running in the background that’s causing it. Look at your startup items, especially anything that might be “watching” what you type.
as someone with years in tech support, it’s also true that programs may not play well with each other. my Login Items: Dropbox (used by millions), ProtonVPN (also), and Things & Things Helper. that’s it. each works well on its own.
i think i’ve found that running Things (not Helper) at startup is problematic. but not when launched after startup.
it’s entirely possible Scrivener is doing something troublesome here. if launching Things manually works for me, fine. i’ll contact them as well, but i’m hoping someone at L&L is tracking these issues. i doubt i’m alone here.
When my file is saved to a cloud platform: iCloud, Dropbox, et al, the beachball comes to play for every manipulation of the sidebar. Talk about disruptive.
Keeping a copy locally (keep downloaded) and backing up to the cloud when I’m done working has resolved the issue.
