How to speed up a slow Mac

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Background, expectations, and best practices

One of the best things about a Mac is that they often take a long time. While this is an excellent feature of a quality product, the performance of your Mac can also decrease if you have it longer. And even if you have a new or relatively new Mac, you'll probably find a value in the tricks.

Memory

We'll take a look at Activity Monitor, which is integrated with MacOS, and provides an excellent way to check the system resources of your Mac and how to do it. There can also be a direction to improve performance.

To open the activity monitor, use Spotlight (click the magnifying glass in the menu bar at the top right) and enter Activity Monitor. Alternatively, you can click on Finder (the blue and white smiley face icon in your dock, usually the left side), and then click Applications → Utilities → Activity Monitor.

You will now see a window like the picture below.

At the top, you'll see five tabs, click Save. At the bottom of the window, we'll see how much memory your Mac has, how it's distributed and how much memory you have.

In the middle of the window, you will notice individual applications and system processes that use resources, but we will not handle them now because it is a bit more advanced.

If you search the different sections of the lower part, you will see a description.

The green section in memory pressure means that there are good memory resources. When you see yellow, your Mac uses memory management processes such as compression and swap to help with the load. If you see red, this means that your storage resources are exhausted.

If you regularly monitor your Mac and see a yellow or red memory, you can quit applications to reduce the load, shut down the Mac, or install more RAM (unlike hard disk or hard drive).

You can find compatible RAM for your Mac at Crucial for really fair prices and iFixit has very good instructions on how to install it for different Macs (not all Macs have user accessable RAM). If you want the Apple Authorized Service Provider to do this, you can find the next one with the Apple website (Apple stores do not install post-purchase RAM updates).

If you do not close your Mac completely completely, starting at least every 3 or 4 days or even once a week, will usually improve performance. When you have completely shut down your Mac ( → Shut Down ...), it deletes cached and compressed files from your memory and reduces all disk space instead of leaving the applications.

Above my Mac used 11.20 GB of memory, and after leaving all applications, it fell to 5.36 GB.

And here, after closing my Mac, you'll notice that memory consumption has fallen to 3.15 GB, compressed memory dropped to 0, and cache memory also dropped by more than 2 GB.

storage space

Another common thing that will slow down your Mac is your hard drive, especially if it is a hard disk. Depending on the Mac you have a hard drive (hard drive) or an SSD (hard drive) or in some cases a combination.

SSDs are much faster, quieter and more reliable overall because they do not move to function. On the other hand, the hard disk runs at 5,400 or 7,200 rpm and has high storage capacities at affordable prices, but is much slower, less reliable and produces more heat.

Most iMacs usually come with a hard drive with high capacity (although some include a Fusion drive which is a combination of hard drive and SSD). Almost all new Apple laptops come with faster SSDs, but some older models in particular the 13-inch MacBook Pro (without Retina display) come with a hard drive.

You can find out what you have by clicking  at the top left of the menu bar and then clicking About This Mac → System Report → SATA / SATA Express. If nothing appears, click Storage just below SATA / SATA Express. Look for references to solid state / SSD or HDD / HDD.

If you have an SSD, your drive is not likely to cause your slowness. However, if you have a hard drive and you often see the color wheel or the beach ball and you are experiencing slow performance, upgrading to an SSD could really improve the performance of your Mac.

I ended up doing this with my iMac 2011 and it really improved performance to the point where I will probably use it for a few more years. Usually, SSDs are about 5-10 times faster than a hard drive (hard drive) depending on what you buy.

A hard drive upgrade is a bit more complicated than upgrading your memory (RAM), which should be best left to an authorized repair provider. Although if you are already out of warranty, feel comfortable doing it, or if you feel like dangerous, iFixit has superb tricks and you can land a fantastic SSD from Crucial starting at $ 100.

A good midfielder that will save you money may be checking with your local repair provider to see if you could install your own reader.

Do this

1. Monitor your memory usage with Activity Monitor to see if your Mac is running slowly due to low memory. See the RAM upgrade options as shared above.

2. If you have a hard drive (HDD), weigh the option and the upgrade costs to an SSD.

3. Also look at the amount of storage you have used and the amount available. This is relatively fast and easy to do and can help improve performance. It is often recommended to leave 10 to 20% of your disk space free. Check out our article on how to effectively free up space and recover lost storage on your Mac.

4. These are many other factors that could cause your Mac to slow down, but these are two major aspects to consider. As always, do not hesitate to ask questions in the comments below.