I have a maxed out 2018 MBP with an i9 and 32GB of ram. On Catalina, I was constantly running 2 Linux VMs, had 3-4 separate Chrome user sessions running with 10+ tabs each, giant MS Excel documents open, XCode w/ 2 apps running simultaneously, iOS Simulator, 1-2 instances of Node, MS Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, PostMan, and barely ever experienced any kind of lag or performance issues. Activity monitor would max out all the time, but then it would use SWAP and my user experience was always great. If I noticed a slowdown, all I had to do was close 1 browser window, and I'd be back to full speed.
After upgrading to Monterey, I keep all my VMs shutdown, any MS application closed, never run more than 1 node instance, and still, I can barely type into this text box without experiencing lag... Application switching takes FOREVER, both via alt-tab, and selecting the application from the dock. Looking at my Activity Monitor, I'm barely using any resources, and somehow, EVERYTHING IS STILL LAGGING!
I am already well aware that Apple purposely curbs their OS performance on "older" hardware, and that this OS is meant to make the M1 chip look better than the Intel chips, but this is a $4,000 laptop, and you've basically turned it into a giant paperweight!
As a comparison, I have a 10 year old MBP with an i7, where the OS has not been upgraded, and it runs 1000x better than my i9 on Monterey.
Does anyone know of any terminal commands I can run to speed things up, or did Apple basically hardcode this OS to lag for non-ARM chipsets?
