Why Is Your Mac Running Slow? Here Are the Reasons & Solutions

Maybe you have never thought that your well-designed Mac machine will run slow one day. Like other computers, old Mac machines actually can also become sluggish.

Also, your inappropriate use of your Mac can lead to its performance degradation. For instance, you upgrade your old Mac model to an incompatible macOS version.

Still confused about why is your Mac running so slow? Keep on reading this guide. It will guide you to diagnose the causes that slow down your Mac. What's more, offers proven methods to enable your Mac to run faster.

Why is your Mac running slow?

There are kinds of reasons that can result in your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air running slowly. And the causes are usually different from users.

We've concluded the most common reasons to answer your question - Why is my MacBook so slow?

Of course, your Mac may also run slowly because of other potential causes.

Mac running slow, how to speed up it?

Whether you want to speed up your lagging MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or Mac mini, the following ways will give you a hand.

If your Mac begins to run slowly all of a sudden, you can refresh your Mac by restarting it to check if it's just a system bug. Or, if your Mac running slow after an update, check if your Mac is too old to be compatible with the new OS version first. And it is also advisable to test the disk speed of your Mac if you are a professional in this field.

Then, you can follow these solutions.

Quit apps and browser tabs you're not using

If you have opened too many apps at a time but only use a few of them, the left ones will keep running in the background and consume the memory which leads to high CPU usage on Mac.

And the more browser tabs you open, the browser will expend more RAM and CPU usage. That may even lead to kernel_task high CPU usage issues.

So, get into a habit of closing the apps and browser tabs that you're not using.

Free up more disk space

Check the disk storage on your Mac (Open the Apple menu > About This Mac > the Storage tab). If there's less than 15% free space on your Mac, free up more storage space. Insufficient disk space could also cause macOS Sonoma run slow after update.

Usually, the accumulation of junk files, caches, useless apps, or DMG files takes up too much space on your Mac. You can remove some useless apps, such as uninstalling Honey on your Mac. Also, you can delete the downloads that accumulate on your Mac.

Besides, remember to empty your Trash in the routine. The deleted files in Trash are still on your startup disk and occupy your disk space.

If you have many videos and other storage-consuming files, you can move them to your iCloud or store them on an external storage device.

Manage your login items

For convenience, you set some programs to automatically open whenever you log into your Mac. But multiple apps running simultaneously in the background will decrease the Mac performance.

You can open Users & Groups in System Preferences. Then remove the apps that are not so necessary for auto-starting when logging in.

Update your Mac and apps

The outdated OS and apps will drag Mac's performance down. Update your Mac usually can update both the operating system and the first-party apps, such as Safari, iTunes, Notes, etc.

To update your Mac, you should click the Apple menu > System Preferences > Software Update. Then check if there's an update or new macOS version available. Next, click Update Now or Upgrade Now to update your Mac.

Upgrade your RAM

If your Mac has insufficient Random Access Memory (RAM), your Mac will run slowly.

That's because the RAM offers storage for ongoing processes. If not have enough RAM for Mac OS to run multiple or intricate tasks, your Mac will slow down.

To check how much your RAM is and its usage, you need to open Activity Monitor (Finder > Applications > the Utilities folder). Move to the Memory tab in the Activity Monitor window. Here, the Physical Memory is your RAM.

If almost all the RAM is used, close the process that takes up too much memory. If your RAM is less than 4GB, you'd better add more RAM. You can ask someone professional or go to a repair center to install RAM.