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I recently purchased a 2020 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro with the M1 processor, and one
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of the things that I noticed was that the computer was so freaking slow despite having
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gotten the 16GB RAM upgrade. In this video I'm going to be talking about what was likely going on and what I did that
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ended up fixing it for me. Now I'm the kind of person that ends up using Chrome with a ton of tabs
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It is possible for me to have 100, 200 tabs open at any given time because I just keep
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opening things and not closing things. And on some of my other laptops, I have even crashed the laptops because I've had so many
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tabs open and I have run the thing out of memory. So I'm definitely an excessive user and I accept that
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So one of the things that I decided to do to try and see if I could figure out what
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was going on is I limited myself to 10 tabs. I kept myself at about 10 tabs and was diligent on that, and yet I still have this problem
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where it was really slow to open Chrome when I type, do anything on it
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It was so slow, even loading pages were really slow, and it was very noticeable that something
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was going on here. So one of the first things that I did is I just tried to, you know, make sure that it
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wasn't any of the extensions that I have. So I went through disabling extensions, I even removed all the extensions, and yet it
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still was really slow. That did help a little bit, but it didn't help much
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It was just almost unbearably slow. Even if I only had one or two tabs open, it was just awful
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And so I found myself using Safari and even Firefox, you know, just so that I could get
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around that in some cases. But that's really hard for me because as a software engineer, I am definitely rely on
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Chrome and I love using the Chrome's developer tools and that's just what I'm used to
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And so to totally give that up and go for Safari and everything just wasn't really very
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practical for me and not something that I wanted to do. So I kept looking for ways to try and figure out what was going on
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Now at this point, I was getting really frustrated because a lot of other people had reported that the extensions was the problem for them and by removing extensions or disabling them
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they were able to find out which extension was causing them problems and that wasn't the case for me
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So as I continued to dig and dig, I found out that the new MacBook Pros with the M1
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chips use something called Rosetta 2, which is basically a tool that takes any of the
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applications that were created for the Intel chips and it allows them to run on the MacBook
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Pro with the M1 chip. And that is supposed to be something that happens flawlessly
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That got me thinking that if Rosetta 2 was needed for Chrome to be able to run on this
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new MacBook Pro, then maybe that has introduced some of the problems
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So I went to Chrome's webpage and I actually found that you can download a version for
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Intel, but they also have a download link for an M1 chip version of Chrome
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Now the reason I hadn't noticed this before was that when you first get your MacBook Pro
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there is an option that allows you to take your other MacBook Pro and there's a utility
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to transfer over all of the data and the applications from one laptop to the other
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to save you a whole bunch of time. It's super cool, really useful
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It brought over the Intel version of Chrome and so Chrome was using Rosetta 2 instead
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of the new MacBook Pro actually going and downloading the M1 version of Chrome
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So I decided to uninstall Chrome and reinstall it using this other M1 download option
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That completely fixed it for me. Ever since then, I've been able to have a ton of tabs open and I haven't had any problems
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more than the normal ones I do when I start maxing out and having an insane amount of
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tabs open. But now my Chrome experience is a lot better, it's really fast and I'm not having any problems
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with it. So if you just got a new M1 MacBook Pro and you're having slow problems with Chrome, did
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you use that utility to transfer things over? If so, definitely try uninstalling Chrome and reinstalling it with the right version
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of Chrome and hopefully that solves it for you. If it does, let me know in the comments below and I'll see you in the next one
