Apple Mac speedup guide to boost performance and response

New Apple Macs are great and have excellent performance. After a few years, several macOS updates, apps and games, they slow down. Here’s how to speed up your Mac and boost performance.

Each of the following tweaks to the system do almost nothing on their own and the effects are tiny, but if you do all of them, the effect is cumulative and when combined they can boost the speed of the Mac a little. They make it more responsive and less likely to stutter when opening apps or scrolling through web pages or documents. You don't have to do all of the tweaks, but the more you do the more benefit you will gain.

Turn off font smoothing

Retina displays have brought a huge improvement in the quality of the image on the screen, but it is not the only way to make things look better. Text is made up of tiny pixels (dots) and to improve the look of text on the screen, macOS can smooth the edges of characters using anti-aliasing (using grey pixels to smooth the boundary between back and white for example).

Anti-aliasing text involves extra work for the processor and this adds to the Mac’s workload. Turn off anti-aliasing to help speed up the Mac. This is only available on some Macs and versions of macOS, so you may or may not have it. Go to System Preferences > General and down at the bottom clear the tick box Use LCD font smoothing when available.

Minimise Dock effects

When applications are minimised a genie effect is used to twist, distort and suck the window down into the Dock. This is interesting the first few times you see it, but after that it becomes boring. Any fancy graphical effects require extra processing power and take time to carry out. Eliminating them speeds up the Mac. You should also stop Doc magnification and animating opening apps. They look nice, but waste time and slow the system.

Go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar and turn off Magnification by clearing the checkbox. As you mouse over the Dock icons, they will not grow and shrink. It does not look as impressive, but it is fast and functional. In the Minimise windows using menu, select Scale effect, which is simpler and faster than the Genie effect. Clear the checkbox next to Animate opening applications.

Time tips

There are lots of time and date options for the menu bar and some of them slow down the Mac because they require more effort to display. OK, we are only talking nano seconds here, but every little bit counts.

Go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar. Scroll down the list of items in the sidebar and select Clock. On the right, clear the checkboxes next to Display the time with seconds (you don’t need them), and Flash the time separators (you can live without them). Don't enable Anounce the time.

Screen saver and desktop

Keep the desktop simple and do not use apps that change the picture, animate it or display information on it - there are App Store apps that do this, so ignore or uninstall them. Go to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Desktop tab and choose a desktop image. Do not use the option to change it on a schedule. It can be set to change as little as every five seconds, which is a crazy time waster and will ruin performance.

Switch to the Screen Saver tab and set the screen saver to start after a long period of inactivity so that it is rarely activated, or simply set it to Never. You should not see the screen saver anyway because in System Preferences > Battery > Battery or Power Adapter you can put the display to sleep when the Mac is inactive anyway. Set a display timeout of 5 or 10 minutes or whatever you prefer.

No spelling check

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard and select the Text tab. Clear the heckbox next to Correct spelling automatically, capitalize words automatically and Add full stop with double space. This reduces the amount of work macOS has to do in certain circumstances, like entereing text, by a tiny amount, which helps to speed up the Mac.

Spelling checkers are often in applications anyway, so it is not much of a disadvantage to turn it off in macOS. For example, Microsoft Word, web browsers and so on, all highlight spelling issues anyway, without the help of macOS.

Remove login items

This is a big one and it can make a large difference to the performance on the Mac. Some apps may automatically start when you log in to your Mac. They run in the background and they require processing power and memory. The Mac will be faster and will have more memory for running apps if you eliminate as many as you can. This one is really important for boosting speed.

Go to System Preferences > Users and Groups then select the Login Items tab. Select each item listed that you don't need and click the minus button below the list to remove them.

Apps you remove can be run from the Applications folder when you need them, rather than running them 24/7.

Manual brightness

The Mac can monitor the amount of light in the room and adjust the screen brightness to automatically adapt to it. That's nice, but turning off everything that is not essential will help to speed up the Mac, so go to System Preferences > Displays and clear the tick against Automatically adjust the brightness. This feature is more irritating than useful anyway. Use the function keys to adjust the screen brightness, such as F1 for dimmer and F2 for brighter.

The keyboard also monitors the light in the room and automatically adjusts the backlight. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard, and on the Keyboard tab clear the tick against Adjust keyboard brightness in low light. As with the screen brightness, there are function keys to manually adjust the brightness - press F5 for dimmer and F6 for brighter.

No sound effects

If you use the Mac with the sound turned up, you will have noticed that various beeps and jingles are heard when you perform actions, such as moving, copying or deleting files, scrolling windows and so on. Finding and playing a sound on the disk takes processing power and your Mac will be quicker if it does not have to do this. A silent Mac is a faster Mac.

Go to System Preferences > Sound and on the Sound Effects tab clear the tick against Play user interface sound effects, and Play feedback when volume is changed. If there is a startup spund option, clear that checkbox too.

Limit trackpad features

You can do all sorts of things with the trackpad, such as two finger taps and swipes, three finger taps and swipes, multi-finger pinch and spread, and so on. You probably cannot remember and therefore don’t use half of them though. Apart from a couple of obvious ones like tap, pinch and spread, what else do you use?

Disable ones you do not use by going to System Preferences > Trackpad. There are three tabs, Point & Click, Scroll & Zoom, and More Gestures. Select each one and clear the tick against any option you do not use. Not sure if this has any effect on speed, but it is usually a good idea to disable things you do no use or need.

Motion and transparency

There are animation and transparency effects in macOS and while they may look nice, they involve extra work by the CPU and graphics system. Eliminate them and the Mac runs a tiny bit faster.

Go to System Preferences > Accessibility and select Display on the left. On the right, check Reduce motion and Reduce transparency.

Turn off dictation

If you do not use dictation to turn speech into text, turn it off because it wastes processing power. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Dictation and set Dictation to Off.

Also go to System Preferences > Siri and turn off all options if you do not use it on your Mac.

Turn off Bluetooth

Some people use Bluetooth accessories and therefore must have Bluetooth turned on, but if you don’t have any then turn it off. Not only is there less work for macOS, the battery will last longer in a MacBook too. Go to System Preferences > Bluetooth and turn it off.

Delete unused fonts

Some applications add fonts to the system and over time the number of fonts grows. When there are an excessive number of them, they can slow down the Mac and it is best to delete the ones you never use.

Run Font Book in the Applications folder and browse the fonts that are installed. If there are any obvious ones that you never use, right click them and select Remove from the menu.

Take care not to remove any that might be used by macOS or any app you have installed. If you are not sure about a font, leave it alone and do not delete it.

Take care with clean-up tools

There are tools that can free up extra space on the disk drive by clearing caches and similar items. Doing this will often slow down the Mac rather than speed it up. Caches are designed to improve performance and clearing them will reduce performance. You should only ever clear caches to solve a problem because they don't do anything for performance. A corrupt cache could slow down the Mac, so it is worth clearing occasionally, just don't do it every day or week.

Do not use antivirus software

Antivirus software has a negative effect on the Mac’s performance. It is only small, but it is measurable and the Mac will run a tiny bit slower because of the processing power, memory and disk activity required. It has a positive effect on the Mac's security though, so you have to weigh performance against security.

If you only ever install software from the Mac App Store, you avoid the worst sites on the web, and you don’t open email attachments, you are very unlikely to ever encounter a virus. You can therefore dispense with the services of antivirus software.

This very much depends on the user and a novice who doesn’t know they shouldn’t open email attachments and enter their admin password when asked for it, someone who downloads cracked software from dodgy websites, and similar people definitely need antivirus software. Sensible, knowledgeable people mostly don’t.