You'll see a list of apps and processes that are running, and every few seconds the list will rearrange. When you first open Activity Monitor, the CPU tab will be selected. Activity Monitor shows the apps slowing you downĪctivity Monitor is built into MacOS and can be found in Applications > Utilities.

To do that, you'll need to get familiar with Activity Monitor. Keep in mind, but you may sacrifice quality for gaining a little extra performance out of your Mac.īefore switching up your favorite apps, you'll need to figure out which ones are slowing down your Mac. Instead of having 15 tabs open at once, limit yourself to seven and learn to be studious in closing older tabs.Īs for image and video editing apps, you can try different apps - like GIMP - that are built to run on a wider range of systems with minimal specs, and thus use fewer resources. If you simply can't give up your browser, you may have to adjust how your workflow. Firefox has been working hard on its Quantum-branded version of its browser, with the most recent update improving speed up to 80% for sites like Google, Instagram or Amazon. If you find that Google Chrome is just too burdensome for your Mac, a fact that our review team has found to be the case, you can switch to another browser like Safari or Firefox. There's no real getting around that since the computing power required to render large image files or encode video files is taxing on almost all systems. Image or video editing apps, like iMovie or Photoshop, are also resource-intensive. As photographer Christopher Michel discovered, Google's Backup and Sync app can also be a drain. If you use Google Chrome, you likely already know it's usually at the top of the list.

However, some apps are more prone to bringing your system to a crawl than others. Your browser is (likely) the biggest culpritĪlmost any app can hog your Mac's processing power and memory, causing sluggish performance as a result. We walk you through the most common apps that hog up system resources, how to figure out which apps are to blame, and give you the best tips for keeping your Mac running as smooth as possible. You can either learn to live with the frequent slowdowns, finding some solace in forced miniature breaks, but it's better to take the time to identify what's ailing your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro and fix it - or at least get it moving again.

(Hopefully, Apple's newly announced $6,000 Mac Pro has enough raw power to sidestep this messy business.) Eventually, the beachball goes away, and you get some more work done until the ball returns. The dreaded beachball makes an appearance, spinning countless times all the while you can't get any work done. It almost never fails, just as you're about to finish a big project for work or school, with a deadline looming, your Mac begins to slow down.

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