Pep up your performance
Keep your Mac running smoothly and find its weak spots to see where tweaks could help
If your Mac feels like it’s struggling, the first step is to narrow down exactly what’s causing this. Age is one obvious possibility: there’s not much inside that will get slower before it actually dies, but hard disks and batteries can definitely get glitchier towards the end of their life. Ultimately, as you keep upgrading your OS and apps but not your hardware, it’s eventually going to fall behind. That’s due in large part to the CPU, which can’t be replaced, and this is why we have the Apple Store and its enticing selection of shiny new Macs.
Before things get to that stage, though, your first port of call to find fixable causes of slow–downs and other shenanigans is Activity Monitor. It lives in Applications/ Utilities, but it’s easiest to find it with Spotlight. Quit all apps and see if anything’s still bothering the system. Now try while doing the things you do in your apps, and see where the strain is showing. It’s normal to see lots of gobbledygook system processes running as part of macOS at all times, but if you can identify any that look suspicious, check our diagnostic tips in our March 2020 issue (Mac|Life 164), where we also discuss how to fix a variety of glitches — even those that can stop your Mac starting up.
INSIDE JOB
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer Macs are internally upgradable. The Mac Pro, 27–inch iMac and some generations of Mac mini can accept RAM, often a cost–effective boost if you have 16GB or less now. Memory supplier websites will find you the right modules. We have already considered storage, which you can always add externally. When it hits the limit of memory, macOS will swap data to the startup drive, and the faster this works, the more responsive your Mac feels. So if your Mac has a hard disk that can’t be replaced with an SSD, installing macOS on a new external SSD could be an effective way to speed up the whole system. You can do this with the standard installer, choosing the external drive after formatting it in Disk Utility as APFS with GUID Partition Map. For recent Macs with a T2 security chip (see support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862), booting from an external drive also requires changing a setting: see support. apple.com/en-us/HT208198.