Restart Your Mac

If your Mac is running slower than usual, the first thing you should do is restart it (choose Apple  > Restart). Merely restarting solves several kinds of problems:

• It forces all apps and background processes to quit, including any that may be chewing up CPU cycles or causing other problems.

• It frees up RAM, giving macOS and apps more room to work when your Mac starts up again.

• It deletes certain temporary files, including virtual memory swap files. This can increase speed if you’re critically short on disk space.

In many cases, restarting brings your Mac immediately back to its normal zippy state. It may not stay that way, of course; the very things that slowed it down in the first place can—and probably will—happen again. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to those too.) But restarting is the easiest way to jolt your Mac back to life, at least temporarily.

Quit Inactive Apps

If you can’t take the time to restart just yet, you can at least quit apps that aren’t actively in use (and, in the future, try to run fewer apps at once). macOS makes it easy to launch one app after the other and keep them running in the background, and most apps are well-behaved enough to keep their usage of system resources down to a minimum when they’re not in the foreground (and, a macOS feature called App Nap causes apps to “sleep” when they’re not visible, though not all apps implement it). But in some cases, seemingly idle apps continue to hammer on your CPU and suck up increasing amounts of RAM—even when you see no evidence of activity on the screen.

Later, in Check Your Resource Usage, I explain how to tell which apps are bogging down your Mac, and to what extent. For now, you can take an easy first pass by glancing at your Dock and noticing which apps’ icons have a glowing dot beneath them (if your Dock is at the bottom) or beside them (if your Dock is on the side), indicating they’re running. (If these dots do not appear, open System Preferences > Dock and check “Show indicators for open applications.”) If there are any apps you haven’t touched in the past hour, right-click (or Control-click) each one’s Dock icon and choose Quit from the Dock menu that appears.

Prune Login Items

macOS provides several mechanisms to run apps automatically when you turn on your Mac or log in. That’s handy, because it eliminates tedious, repetitive actions and ensures that software you depend on to perform background tasks is always available. However, you can have too much of a good thing. One issue is that every startup and login item increases the amount of time it takes before your Mac is ready to use when you restart or log in. Another is that having more apps running at once means higher CPU usage (slowing you down) and higher RAM demands (possibly leading to increased virtual memory pageouts, which, as I pointed out in RAM, can slow down your Mac in multiple ways).

So, take a few moments now to review what loads when you log in. If you find any such items that you don’t truly need to run all the time, you can (as appropriate) disable them as login items or even delete them.

Unfortunately, you may have to do a bit of hunting to find items that load on startup. I go into detail about what to look for and where to look in Prune Startup and Background Items, later.

For now, concentrate on login items by doing the following:

1. Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups, select your account, and click Login Items.

2. Look for items you don’t need to run when you log in. When you find one, select it and click the minus button.

3. Choose Apple  > Log Out Username and click Log Out to confirm.

4. Log back in to your account.

If you later decide you want to disable more login items, repeat these steps as needed.

Log Out of Other Accounts

If you use the macOS Fast User Switching feature to log in to more than one account at the same time (as you might do if family members or coworkers share a single Mac), each logged-in account uses a portion of your RAM, and more so if an account has lots of open apps and documents. Because RAM constraints can lead to a slow Mac, one simple solution if you start to feel the squeeze is to log out of the other accounts, freeing up the memory they’re using.

To log out of another account on your Mac:

1. Choose another logged-in user’s name from the Fast User Switching menu in the Finder. You can tell who’s logged in by the orange checkmark next to the name.

2. If prompted to do so, enter (or have the other person enter) that account’s password and click Log In.

3. Choose Apple  > Log Out Username and click Log Out to confirm.

4. Log back in to your own account.

Repeat if necessary for any other logged-in users.

Upgrade Your Firmware

I mention upgrading your firmware here not because it has a high likelihood of speeding up your Mac, but because:

• Outdated firmware could contain bugs that lead (even if indirectly) to a slow Mac.

• Sometimes the latest version of macOS (which you should also install; see the next section) requires updated firmware.

• Updating your firmware is usually easy and relatively fast.

The process of updating your firmware is only slightly more involved than updating software. As with macOS updates, firmware updates are generally available via System Preferences > Software Update in Mojave and later, and through the App Store in High Sierra and earlier (choose Apple  > App Store and click Updates). Alternatively, Apple provides complete details on how to find out whether firmware updates are available for older Mac models, and how to download and install them if so. I won’t reiterate all the steps here but rather will refer you to Apple’s article About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers.

Reset the SMC

Macs contain circuitry referred to as the System Management Controller (SMC), which is responsible for performing tasks related to power management, fan operation, status indicator lights, and other components. If the SMC gets confused for some reason, a long list of strange behaviors could result, one of which is unusually slow performance. The only way to fix problems caused by a malfunctioning SMC is to reset it—a simple procedure that should take less than a minute.

A page on Apple’s website describes all the symptoms that might require an SMC reset and the procedures for resetting the SMC on various Mac models.

But before you jump in and reset the SMC, you should be aware of one detail. Apple’s page insists repeatedly that resetting the SMC should be done only after performing several other troubleshooting steps and checking after each one to see if the problem still exists. It does not say whether any problems could arise if you reset the SMC too often or when it’s not absolutely necessary.

So, should you reset it or not?

Crucially for our purposes, one of the symptoms Apple lists as potentially requiring an SMC reset is the following: “Your Mac performs unusually slowly, even though its CPU isn’t under an abnormally heavy load.”

You can read about determining CPU usage in Check Your Resource Usage. But the thing I want you to notice about this symptom is that it’s vague: what counts as “unusual” or “abnormal”? Presumably, if you’re reading this book you feel your Mac is too slow, and your SMC could be one of the reasons for that. If it is, nothing other than resetting the SMC will solve the problem.

Apple mentions no tests that can definitively show, in advance, whether the fault truly lies with the SMC—but neither does the company indicate any risks or consequences to resetting the SMC when it’s not actually misbehaving. I’ve reset the SMC on my various Macs, sometimes without a particularly good reason to do so, on numerous occasions—and have never noticed any ill effects. So, my feeling is that if you can legitimately say that your CPU usage is low and your Mac is still unacceptably slow, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by resetting the SMC.

Update macOS

Every minor update to the Mac operating system (such as 10.13.6) and major upgrade (such as 10.14) includes numerous bug fixes. If one of those fixed bugs happened to be involved in the problem that made your Mac too slow, updating macOS is the best—or, perhaps, only—way to fix it. So I always suggest applying at least the free, minor updates and, if your Mac supports them, the paid, major updates too.

In addition to fixing bugs, sometimes Apple makes changes that improve overall performance without affecting the look and feel of the operating system. For example, the memory compression feature Apple added in 10.9 Mavericks (see RAM) effectively gave every Mac more free RAM, and helped to increase the battery life of notebook Macs.

You may quibble with my calling a macOS update a quick fix, especially if you’re installing a major new version of macOS. After all, you should first make a bootable duplicate of your disk so you have a safety net in the unlikely event that something goes wrong during the upgrade, and you may want to review the appropriate version of my Upgrading book (see below) for tips and advice. All this can take hours. But it’s usually time well spent, and, all things considered, it’s an easy way to eliminate numerous potential causes of slowdowns with a single procedure.

One caution I’ll make, however, is that newer versions of macOS are sometimes more resource-intensive than the ones that preceded them. The macOS installer won’t let you upgrade if your Mac doesn’t meet the minimum system requirements, but the fact that an older Mac is still officially supported doesn’t guarantee that macOS will run well on it. If your Mac just barely meets the criteria for the new version of macOS, you might not be pleased with the performance afterward.

Upgrade Your RAM

One of the recurring themes of this book is that RAM = speed. It’s not the only factor, of course, but it’s a big one. If your Mac is too slow overall, adding physical RAM is one of the best and most effective ways to speed it up. Sure, you can get part of the way there by reducing the demands on your existing RAM (as discussed, for example, previously in Quit Inactive Apps), but if you have too little RAM, all those other ministrations amount to band-aid solutions.

Later, in Add RAM, I go into detail about how much RAM you should have, where to get it, and what to do with it. For now, I simply want to say: do it. Even if it involves placing an order, waiting a week for a box to arrive in the mail, and setting aside a half hour to perform minor surgery on your Mac, increasing your RAM to a comfortable level often turns out to be a quicker and easier solution to slow performance than anything else.