Green
“Your computer is using all of its RAM efficiently.” Nothing to do. A full memory bar with a green graph is a working machine.
Software · guide
How to speed up MacBook, and the advice Apple leaves out
By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 11 min read
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.
Apple’s published list, in Apple’s order
Five items. That is the whole page.
- Not enough free space on the startup disk.
“Move files to another disk or an external storage device, then delete files you no longer need.” The route: Apple menu → System Settings → General → Storage, then “click the storage recommendations you want to use”. - An app needing more memory than the Mac has easily available.
Use Activity Monitor to see how much memory the Mac and its apps are using, and check the app’s own system requirements. - An app that is not compatible with your Mac.
“For example, an app may require a different processor or graphics card.” Apple then tells you how to look up both. - Apps you are not using.
Quit them. - A problem with the disk.
“Use Disk Utility to verify and try and fix any issues.”
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.
No cache clearing. No deleting system files. No cleaning app. No maintenance routine, no “speed-up” utility, no folder to empty by hand. Apple’s complete published answer to a slow Mac contains none of it, and the list is short enough that the absence is hard to read as an oversight.
That is not proof those things never help. It is a statement about where the burden of proof sits: the manufacturer, which has every reason to want your Mac feeling fast, publishes five causes and nothing else. An instruction that is not on this list is somebody else’s claim, and worth treating as one.
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.
“When you have free or unused memory, your computer performance does not necessarily improve. macOS obtains the best performance by efficiently using and managing all of your computer’s memory.”
Apple puts that sentence at the top of the page about memory, before the graph it is explaining. It contradicts the premise of every tool that offers to free up your RAM — the idea that empty memory is healthy memory. On a Mac, memory that is full is memory that is being used, and Apple describes that as the goal rather than the problem. Which is why the thing to read is not how much is free, but the graph below.
Yellow
“Your computer might eventually need more RAM.” A watch-this rather than a do-this — Apple’s wording is deliberately unhurried.
Red
“Your computer needs more RAM.” The one unambiguous verdict on the page, and the only one that points at hardware.
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 guide 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.
The other manufacturer names the same two causes first. Microsoft’s documentation of the page file explains what happens when memory runs out rather than when it is merely busy: the page file is a “physical extension of RAM” that lets the system “remove infrequently accessed modified” pages from memory to disk. That is the mechanism behind the slowdown people describe as the machine “thinking”, and it is why a full startup disk and a shortage of memory produce the same symptom: when there is no room to page out to, there is nowhere for the memory pressure to go.
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.
Where to start
Three ways in. If it is slow inside one app only, take the second.
- “It is slow at everything.”
- Disk space and memory — the five causes
- “It is slow in one app.”
- The compatibility item — the five causes
- “Do I need more memory?”
- The traffic light, not the free figure — the memory question
The five causes
Disk space, memory, an incompatible app, apps left open, and a disk problem. Apple’s whole list, with nothing to install and nothing to clean.
A Mac that starts slowlyOne restart with Shift held settles it — and Apple never blames the login list itself.Open this guide →
Is the Mac actually chargingAmber means two opposite things, USB-C has no light at all, and the menu has four answers.Open this guide →
Why a computer is slowThe same question on any machine, in the order the causes actually occur.Open this guide →
Force quitting on a MacThree routes, and the one that works when the screen has stopped responding.Open this guide →
Restarting a MacBookOne menu item and one checkbox — and the power button does two other things entirely.Open this guide →
The memory question
Apple says free memory does not necessarily mean better performance. The number to read is the pressure graph, and it has three colours.
Clearing a cache on a MacTwo separate commands — and neither is described by Apple in terms of speed.Open this guide →
Freeing up iCloud storageWhat is actually taking the space, in the order Apple lists it.Open this guide →
Deleting apps on a MacTwo different routes, and the one that leaves things behind.Open this guide →
When it is the disk
The fifth cause produces symptoms that look like the other four. It is worth ruling out early rather than last.
Checking a drive’s healthMicrosoft has removed WMIC from supported versions of Windows 11; Get-PhysicalDisk, a PowerShell cmdlet, has a HealthStatus column.Open this guide →
Backing up a MacBookApple lists four ways and puts them in an order — and only one recovers a deleted file.Open this guide →
Factory resetting a MacBookIt erases settings, data and apps — and leaves the operating system exactly where it was.Open this guide →
Not covered here. 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 advice Apple leaves out is named as missing rather than filled in, and everything Apple does publish is here in Apple’s own terms.
Sources
- Apple, If your Mac runs slowly — Mac User Guide (the five listed causes: a startup disk without enough free space, with the instruction to move files to another disk or external storage device and delete files no longer needed, the note that macOS can help optimise storage by storing files in the cloud, and the route through Apple menu, System Settings, General and Storage to the storage recommendations; an app requiring more memory than the Mac has easily available, with Activity Monitor used to see memory usage and the app’s own documentation consulted for its system requirements; an app that is not compatible with the Mac, for example one requiring a different processor or graphics card, with the routes through System Settings, General and About for the processor and through About and System Report to Graphics/Displays for the graphics card; quitting apps that are not being used; and problems with the disk, with Disk Utility used to verify and try to fix any issues) — support.apple.com, read 22 August 2026.
- Apple, Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor — Activity Monitor User Guide (that the Memory pane shows how much memory the Mac is using, how often it swaps memory between RAM and the startup disk, and how much memory is compressed; the statement that when you have free or unused memory computer performance does not necessarily improve and that macOS obtains the best performance by efficiently using and managing all of the computer’s memory; the three Memory Pressure colours — green meaning the computer is using all of its RAM efficiently, yellow meaning it might eventually need more RAM, and red meaning it needs more RAM; and the route of holding the Option key and choosing Apple menu, System Information, then Hardware, Memory and the Memory Slots pane to find Upgradeable Memory, with the note that if the Memory Slots pane does not appear then upgradeable memory is not available for that Mac) — support.apple.com, read 22 August 2026.
- Microsoft Learn — Introduction to the page file: what a system does when memory runs short, read as the mechanism behind a slowdown that looks like a disk problem — learn.microsoft.com, read 4 September 2026.
Written by Alberto Gulotta
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Written on 22 August 2026 · last checked 23 September 2026.
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