MacBook Pro 2020 performance q's

[linear2202]

HI,

Wondering if people might be willing to indulge me? I'm contemplating upgrading to a 2020 core I5 MacBook Pro from a 2017 core I5 MacBook Pro. For the most part, looking for the performance improvements that I would get.

For me, I notice that MS Office applications are always slow to start on first launch. Excell takes around 8 seconds. Other applications are similar. Wondering if someone could look at first launch of an MS Office application after a fresh startup and see if this is much faster?

Also, I use Parallels to run Quicken in Windows. Does anyone use parallels? Is the start up time pretty good when launching Windows until you can start applications etc? When I try to launch quicken from the Mac dock menu, it takes about a minute of waiting before I can actually use it. Windows starting up etc.

So just wondering if this startup time is much faster or not?

TIA for indulging my questions.

 

[xanadome]

Sounds like you are an experienced user, and 2017.2020 MBPs are powerful machines. Things I can think of about those slow loading apps are usual suspects, which I am sure you know. Clear the RAM by restarting, close open-programs you are not using, but most of all, M$ Office apps are truly bloated ones, using up a lot of RAM. Or slowing the CPU due to heating. There used to be a person in Apple named Sir (?!) Jony Ives who was obsessed with the "thinness" (yes, a design over function stuff and the capacity of heat sink and cooling fan in many Apple laptops are grossly inadequate compared with PCs in general, resulting in slowing down of CPU.

 

[Just_Me_D]

How much RAM does your current MacBook Pro has? The reason I ask if because the 2017 MBP is still fairly new and it is a beast of a machine so unless something is hogging up your RAM, you should still be quite happy with it, in my opinion. As for 8 seconds, that’s not a long time.

 

[linear2202]

Thanks for the replies to to you both. It has 8 gigs of RAM. It runs fine, but I seem to be able to do enough the fans spin up a fair amount. And, to a degree, the time of 8 seconds or so it's to long, but it's kind of annoying in the world when iphones and ipads launch apps so quick. I bought this a year ago from Apple as a refurbished unit.

I don't know if that much hogs up the ram per say. I load up safari, mail, fantastical, reeder, twitterific, onenote, onedrive. I use a third party finder replacement too, but not always. This uses about 6 gigs or so. I use Parallels too to load windows and Quicken, but this not daily. Loading up office apps is daily at times, but varies. I'm looking at moving to Quicken for Mac and that somewhat reduces my need for Parallels.

I just figured I would ask. If the gains are minimal, then not really worth the investment. The upcoming Apple Silicon machines...

 

[xanadome]

OneDrive!
I use both iCloud Drive and OneDrive for different purposes. Anything to do with M$ Office, it automatically goes into OneDrive. But I am noticing that even a small change in Office docs, OneDrive starts saving and it takes a long time to finish it (probably depending on time of the day etc. Sometime fast). When it starts running, fan always start running almost immediately and for a long time depending on the size of the docs or degree of changes to be saved. It is very noticeable for my 32Gb RAM Mac Mini (2018). So, the rising temp might be RAM independent. My RAM usage usually hovers around 40 to 50%. In any case, if the temperature won't stay high, 60 or 70 degree, I would not worry about it.

 

[linear2202]

Thanks. I'll look at what happens with Onedrive. I have used it for a long time and don't anticipate leaving it any time soon.