The Mac is slow. Here are the four things it usually is.
A slow Mac is almost always one of four problems, and only one of them needs new hardware. How to tell which one you have, in plain language, without installing anything.
"It has just got slow" is one of the most common reasons somebody calls me, and it is also one of the least useful sentences in the world, because slow is a symptom and not a cause.
The good news is that after enough of these, the causes stop being mysterious. In houses and small offices, a slow Mac is nearly always one of four things. Only one of them costs real money to fix.
Here is how to work out which one you have. You do not need to install anything and you cannot break anything by looking.
1. Too much starting up without being asked
Every few years you install something that decides it should run permanently. Printer software. A scanner utility. Something a photo frame came with. Adobe's updater. Each one is small; twenty of them are not.
How to check: open System Settings, then General, then Login Items & Extensions. You will see a list of things that launch when you log in and a second list of background items. Most people are surprised by the length.
What to do: turn off anything you do not recognise or no longer use. Nothing in that list is required for the Mac to start — it is all optional software that asked for permission once, years ago, and got it.
This is free, takes ten minutes, and is the single most common fix.
2. The drive is nearly full
macOS needs free space to work in. Not for your files — for its own scratch work, swap, caches, and the temporary copies it makes when it saves anything. When free space gets tight, the machine starts shuffling instead of working, and the whole system feels like it is wading.
How to check: System Settings, General, Storage. Look at the free space, not the pretty coloured bar.
Rough rule: if you are under about 10% free, that is your problem, or a large part of it. On a 256 GB drive that means fewer than 25 GB left.
What to do: the usual culprits are photos and videos, old iOS backups, and the Downloads folder — which for most people is a decade-long archive of things they needed once. Emptying the Trash afterward is not optional; deleted files occupy space until you do.
3. The storage itself is old, or dying
Two different versions of this.
A spinning hard drive in a machine that should have an SSD. If your Mac is old enough to have a mechanical drive — you can sometimes hear it, a faint whirring or clicking under load — then it is not slow because of anything you did. It is slow because that part is slow, and no amount of cleaning will change it. Replacing it with an SSD is the single most dramatic upgrade in computing; machines that felt ready for the bin come back to life. On the models where this is possible it is not an expensive job.
An SSD near the end of its life. Less common, more serious. The signs are different: not consistently slow, but occasional long freezes, beachballs that last a minute, apps that fail to open and then open fine, files that will not save. That pattern is not a performance problem. That is a machine telling you it is going to fail.
What to do: if you are seeing the second pattern, stop reading and make sure your files are copied somewhere else today. Then get it looked at. The window between "occasionally odd" and "will not start" can be short.
4. The browser, and only the browser
Worth separating out, because half the time "the computer is slow" means "Safari is slow" and the rest of the machine is fine.
Browsers are where most people actually live now, and they are the heaviest software on the machine by a wide margin. Sixty open tabs is sixty live programs. Extensions and toolbars — especially ones that arrived without being invited — add more.
How to check: open Activity Monitor (Applications, Utilities) and sort by Memory. If the top ten entries are all your browser, you have your answer.
What to do: close tabs you are keeping "to read later" and bookmark them instead. Then look through your browser's extensions and remove anything you did not deliberately choose.
What it usually is not
Not enough RAM. Sometimes true, but far less often than people are told, and on any Mac made in the last several years the RAM is soldered to the chip and cannot be added at all. If somebody quotes you for a RAM upgrade on a recent Mac, ask them to show you which part they intend to replace.
A virus. Genuinely rare on Macs. Junk software that nags and slows things down is common; actual malware is not. If a program you did not install is telling you your Mac is infected, that program is the infection.
Age, as such. A seven-year-old Mac doing email, documents and the web should still feel fine. If it does not, something on this list is true of it.
The honest summary
Three of these four are free to fix and one of them is not. Work down the list in order and most people find their answer before they get to the part that costs money.
If you would rather not go poking through System Settings, that is completely reasonable — this is exactly the sort of thing I do on a normal visit, and I will tell you which of the four it is before I touch anything, along with what it would cost to put right.
Call (503) 567-5975 or email support@ironwood.help.