MacBook Pro Early 2015 Performance

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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dark_azureus
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Joined: Wed May 17, 2023 6:13 pm

MacBook Pro Early 2015 Performance

Post by dark_azureus » Wed May 17, 2023 6:31 pm

Hey Guys,

I've been using Ableton on different Macs over times and in the last years it has been a MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012 with i7 2.9GHz and 8GB RAM.
I never had any performance issues even with bigger projects. Only the non-retina screen bugged me so I got a MacBook 13" Early 2015 i7 3.1GHz and 16GB RAM.
After setting up Ableton I noticed, that the A11s demo project played back with massive cracks and pops on the integrated sound output and CPU at 70-80% usage at buffer size 256. For comparison I fired up the 2012 MBP and it played the demo track flawlessly at buffer size 2012 with CPU usage of around 50%.

What I also noticed is that I get latency values of around 5ms at buffer size 128 on all Macs in my environment, no matter if 2011 iMac or 2021 MBP.
2015 MBP is the only device with 20ms at buffer size 128.

I also tried a Focusrite 2i2 2nd Gen and a Behringer UMC, I booted the 2012 MBPs drive on the 2015 MBP which leads me to the conclusion that the problem is related to the hardware of the 2015 MBP. There is no thermal throttling going on and benchmark score look fine.

However Ableton seems to use only up to 50% of the available CPU capacity when looking at the Activity monitor and Intel Power Gadget.

EDIT: I also tried different OS versions like High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and Monterey as the currently latest for 2015 MBP.

Are there any known issues with Ableton and the Early 2015 MBP? Perhaps a simple solution or workaround?
At the moment I am very sad because I really love everything about the 2015 MBP except the fact that it performs worse than a device that is 3 yrs older.

I am grateful for everything on this topic and I hope there are still people using "vintage" Macs :D

Best regards!

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