Sort visual effects and hardware upgrades

Speed up your Mac by switching off Sierra’s advanced graphics features

IT WILL TAKE

10 minutes

YOU WILL LEARN

How to adjust system-hogging visual settings

YOU’LL NEED

macOS Sierra

If your Mac is running slowly, the advanced visual effects of macOS Sierra may be to blame.

As with the previous OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra uses a transparency effect on windows, menus and the Dock by default, where you see a rough translucent shape of objects behind an open window or menu as you browse the desktop. It looks nice, but there’s no real need for it. If you have used Apple Macs for a while, you might even prefer a look and feel which is more opaque.

Follow the steps in the tutorial to reduce transparency. Ticking the box will take effect immediately without requiring a restart. If you don’t see any change, you may be using an older machine that didn’t support the transparency feature in the first place.

If you’re finding that Mission Control and/or the Notification Centre is performing poorly, you can also tick the Reduce Motion feature. Usually when launching Mission Control the windows boomerang onto your screen. You can change this, so that when launching Mission Control, any open windows simply fade in. Follow step 2 – ‘Reduce Window Motion’ – in the tutorial below to do this. The changes you make here will also take effect immediately so return to the desktop to see if there’s been any improvement.

Deal with the dock

The Dock also contains a number of advanced graphics effects which you can disable to speed up macOS. The ‘magnification’ effect, whereby icons increase in size when you hover your mouse over them, for instance, isn’t necessary. If you find it difficult to see the icons after disabling magnification, you can increase the dock size permanently.

The default ‘genie effect’ used for minimising windows, also consumes precious resources. You can modify this from the Dock settings so that they minimise in a simpler way. Also, by default, when opening programs from the dock, the icons animate to show you the program is launching which also consumes system resources. Follow the steps in the tutorial to disable this feature too.

In future, if you need to know if an app has been launched, simply look for the small black dot underneath the app icon. This signifies that the app has been opened. This is also useful when your system is performing slowly as you can check that no unnecessary applications are open. Nate Drake