It doesn't even have to be low end hardware. I just gave back a laptop to a client that I was working with in healthcare. It's a 16" MBP with an i7 and 32GB of RAM. The machine itself is really fast but gets bogged down by all the other crap it has to connect to. They had McAfee endpoint security on these things and it would prevent any unauthorized apps from running as well as hog between 50-70% of the CPU during it's daily "checks" (which ran every hour). I eventually had to patch a kernel ktext just to get the endpoint to shut up and stop eating my memory.
The problem isn't hardware necessarily (well it is here), but it's also the bundled software. Not only are these machines old but they are having to load all this extra shit that slows down the whole experience that much more.
Don't get me started on MDM and the like. It's a cancer for machines and causes all sorts of issues. I understand that some industries have certain compliance that either forces them to do this (or makes them think they need to) but I will not work in those industries. Send me a clean MBP and trust me to do my job. In fact, more and more I'd rather just a stipend and I'll buy my hardware. I've managed to effectively do this at my last 2 companies. Sorry but I know my needs better than anyone else and I'd honestly rather pay out of pocket and make it up on my salary than work on underpowered hardware.
Mobile device management, software that runs on your computer that talks back to a command/control-type server where your IT Dept can monitor the machine and push software/updates to your machine.
God my work machine is like this. People (rightfully) complain about power use by crypto, but I wonder how much power is wasted by McAfee et al? I wish there would be public outcry over it :)
For years, techies made fun of people not running anti-virus software. Eventually, people came to accept that it was necessary. Then, the anti-virus software people launched a trove of crapware based on enterprise needs that ruined the concept of anti-virus. Now, techies are advocating to not run that crapware at all. There has to be an MBA course on this "how to build a bloated program designed by managers using all the buzzwords" type of thing.
It's astounding the amount of CPU that things use doing nothing. Zoom takes constant 4% CPU usage to show a login screen and Slack does 20% doing nothing. Turning off gifs for Slack drops that back down to ~5%. But still 5% for a chat app at idle.
To be clear, it’s not apple’s fault —- but they do own the OS and the scheduler.
I’ve previously experimented with the kill command, stopping and starting applications. Apple could do this automatically and reduce that 5% to 1%, or even 0.1%.
This assumes that Slack is doing something over and over many times, rather that just being super-slow at doing the thing once.
Slack is a chat app, and as you say has no business requiring 5% of a CPU. If it’s doing that because it checks for new messages more often than once per second, Apple can help them with that. If they actually require more than a second to check for messages, then their requirements or their developers need to change.
Oh it's not low end hardware, its endless enterprise crapware designed to secure stuff. Enterprise malware proliferates likes admonishing signs in a government office, and for the same reason: it's easy. And it has the same effect: useless clutter that makes the place worse.
At my current position I've been using the same 2015 MBP since...2015. As time goes on corporate keeps deciding more security issues exist and they keep shoveling on the 'security' software. So not only is my hardware aging - they're making it worse by artificially slowing it down.
The last agent they installed had a nasty habit of pegging the CPU at 100% and locking up virtual machines for 10-15s at a time anytime there was heavy disk activity. Luckily I still have root on the local machine so I wrote a quick script to loop and kill that process whenever it spawned. I'm not bragging about that, but it is what it is I guess.
The problem isn't hardware necessarily (well it is here), but it's also the bundled software. Not only are these machines old but they are having to load all this extra shit that slows down the whole experience that much more.