It's a M1 Pro 10 core, 32GB and 1TB SSD. A fresh install/factory reset I guess, I opened it and needed to enter my accounts and so on. It's not refurbished but was checked by an IT company before being sold to me (was a work laptop before). The SSD is completely empty, I didn't install any apps yet.

I'll give it another few hours, try disabling the liquid ass effect and check activity monitor, maybe it's spotlight indexing(?). Since many users report the laggy user interface, it might just be Tahoe, in that case I'll try downgrading to Sequoia. A bit annoying that MacOS needs a lot more work then Windows but it might just be my timing, getting a MacBook after the release of Tahoe.

 

@fnord23 you have a powerful machine with enough CPU power, RAM and storage space. If you have proof it was checked by an IT company they ran a diagnostic on the machine and your hardware is healthy.

I would downgrade to Sequoia.

My brand new M4 MBP has only 24gb or RAM and 512gb of storage compared to yours and it run as it should.
I'm on sequoia 15.1 and didn't upgrade to Tahoe. I will eventually update to the latest version of Sequoia if there are any efficiency benefits to it but I need to research it.

What you describe is unheard of to me, I'm typing this on my 2014 Intel MBP with 16gb of RAM and a 250gb HD (no SSD) operating under BigSur and I have zero problems with finder and apps laughing immediately, it would be crazy if it wasn't the case.
I can still run Live 12, Logic Pro, Serum, Serum 2, Dune 3, Spire, Fabfilter, Valhalla, Devious Machines, Kclip, Boost, etc with no problem unless I absolutely abuse Voices and Polyphony.

Click and pops on 32gb of RAM and a M1 chip which manage CPU efficiency better than a M3 thanks to it's better performance cores is not right. Apple core audio can't be compared to Windows drivers, there is no competition.

Is your audio interface plugged directly into your MBP or into a dock ?
Is the samplerate of your DAW set as the same as your audio interface ?
Do you make orchestral music with tons of samples libraries and hundreds of tracks ?

Hopefully you will have a way better experience soon.