Software tower · floor

How to speed up MacBook, and the advice Apple leaves out

How to speed up MacBook has a published answer from Apple, and the useful thing about it is how short it is. Five causes, one page, and nothing that needs buying.

Two of those five are the ordinary ones and hardly need a page: quit what you are not using, and make room on the disk. Apple’s storage route is worth taking literally though, because the recommendations it offers are computed from your machine rather than copied from an article — System Settings → General → Storage, then choose among what it suggests.

The third item is the one almost nothing else mentions, and it is the most interesting. An app may simply not be compatible with the Mac it is running on — Apple’s example is that it “may require a different processor or graphics card”. To check what you have: System Settings → General → About for the processor, and About → System Report → Graphics/Displays for the graphics card. A machine that is slow only inside one application is worth testing against that before anything else.

The second item, memory, deserves its own section — partly because Activity Monitor is where Apple sends you, and partly because Apple prefaces it with a sentence that runs against the entire market built around this question.

That traffic light is the actual answer to “do I need more memory”, and it is worth noticing how careful the middle one is. Yellow is not an instruction. Apple says the computer might eventually need more RAM — a sentence written to avoid being read as a purchase recommendation, which is the opposite of how the same information is usually presented.

Whether you can even add memory, and how the answer arrives. Apple’s method: “press and hold the Option key, then choose Apple menu → System Information. Under Hardware on the left, click Memory. In the Memory Slots pane, go to Upgradeable Memory.” And then the part worth knowing before you go looking: “If the Memory Slots pane doesn’t appear, upgradeable memory isn’t available for your Mac.” The absence of the pane is the answer — which is a strange way to be told something, and a definite one.

The fifth item sends you to Disk Utility, and it is the one to take seriously rather than last, because a disk with problems produces symptoms that look like everything else on this list. What Disk Utility does and does not check has its own floor below.

What this page will not do is add a sixth item. Apple publishes five, this site has run no controlled test of anything outside them, and the honest thing is to hand you the vendor’s list rather than pad it.

It also will not recommend a cleaner. Not because they are all bad, but because saying so would require having run one on a slow Mac and measured the result — and until that has happened, a recommendation here would be a link with an opinion attached to it.

What this tower will not do

It will not add a sixth cause to Apple’s five. Nothing outside that list has been tested here, and padding a vendor’s list is how invented maintenance advice spreads.

It will not recommend a cleaning app. That would need one run against a genuinely slow Mac with the result measured, and that has not happened.

And it will not tell you to free up memory. Apple’s own page says free memory does not necessarily improve performance, which is as close to a direct contradiction of that advice as a manufacturer is likely to print. What holds instead is simple: the five published causes of a slow Mac and the routes Apple gives for each — the Storage settings and its recommendations, Activity Monitor for memory, System Settings and System Report for the processor and graphics card, quitting unused apps, and Disk Utility — together with the statement that free or unused memory does not necessarily improve performance, the three Memory Pressure colours and their meanings, and the System Information route to Upgradeable Memory including the note that a missing Memory Slots pane means upgradeable memory is not available, are quoted from Apple’s documentation listed below.