How to speed up MacBook Pro M1, debunk some misconceptions about what makes Mac slow, and help you avoid some massive mistakes many Mac users make.

Ways to Speed up MacBook Pro M1

1. Connectivity

The first thing to ask yourself is, is it a slow internet connection or a slow Mac? If you think it’s just your internet connection, then resolve it.

2. Third-Party Apps

• If your entire Mac is slow, the first thing to do is check for those bad third-party cleaner apps. They are the worst offenders when slowing down your Mac.
• Check if you have installed it. You may remember doing it, but you can always go to Finder, on the lower left-hand corner of the screen>a little smiley face guy>tap on Applications on the left> take a look through here to see if you have any cleaner apps.

3. Cleaner Apps

• Go to Safari>the lower left-hand corner of the screen>click on that>hold Command>hit the T key to open a new tab and MacKeeper; I will pick on them today.
• You can search on Google to uninstall MacKeeper and find lots of useful results. 
• MacKeeper has gotten better over the years, but it’s still unnecessary.
• Drag applications from the Applications folder into the trash can, empty the trash, and be done. But not with these apps.

And later on, we’ll also show you another way to find out if something like this is running through Activity Monitor. It can be challenging to uninstall these apps. 

4. Activity Monitor

Fortunately, to avoid getting into too much trouble, they have guides about how to do it. But for instance, on this one, you have to manually go to all these different folders and delete a bunch of files. So it’s just not the best process. Avoid them in the first place.

• Next, check Activity Monitor.
• See if there’s anything that’s using a ton of your CPU. – Hold Command, and hit the Space bar to open Spotlight search.
• Activity Monitor is the first suggestion. Type in the act. Tap the Return key to open it up. And this is Activity Monitor. – First, you want to ensure you’re viewing all processes.
• Click the View menu in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and make sure that All Processes are checked here. Then close the View menu and tap on the % CPU.
• And you might have to tap it twice if it was already selected to get the descending view. And then, you’ll see a list of what’s running on your Mac in descending order.
• Most of these things are fine. In my case, I don’t see anything here that is concerning because I am vigilant about keeping this issue away from my Mac.

5. Statistics

• If you see something up to 90, 95, or 99%, that is slowing down your Mac. It’s using all of your CPU. And it’s also not uncommon.
• When you open Activity Monitor for the first time, Activity Monitor is the top process. These readings show why you got to know How to Speed up MacBook Pro M1.
• That causes the app to open up, and it’s starting up, which is normal.
• But if you see something 90% or more, that’s the problem.
• Another common reason Macs get slow is that they run out of storage space.

6. MacBook Pro Storage

• The rule of thumb here is very important: make sure you have twice as much hard drive and SSD storage space on your Mac as you do RAM. So RAM times two, that’s how much you want free so that the virtual Memory, the swap space, has enough space to work within the drive. How do we check?
• Click the Apple menu on the upper left-hand corner of the screen.>Click about this Mac.>Click about this Mac.
• You can see how much RAM your Mac has next to Memory, 32 gigabytes. We want at least 64 gigabytes of hard drive storage.
• Tap Storage here in the middle. I have 1.04 terabytes, or a thousand gigabytes, available. It’s more than 64. I’m in good shape.
• Next, we’re going to check for a macOS update. Always a good idea to keep your Mac running the most recent version of macOS. Keep it running smoothly.
• Yeah, your computer might get faster with a more recent version of macOS. A lot of times, that’s what happens with Mac. 

7. System Preferences

• So to quit a program is different on a Mac than closing the window. And the reason behind doing it that way is reopening a window is much faster if the program is open than opening the whole program from scratch.
• To close programs that are open on your Mac, two-finger click, or if you have a mouse, Control + click on any of these icons with the dot underneath, you’ll see Quit; choose Quit.
• Those dots are disappearing now that we’ve closed these apps. – Indeed. And then when you go back in and open it for the first time, for instance, Firefox, we’ll take a look at that. It will reopen its default view.
• So it’s okay. There are also a lot of app icons in the Menu bar that we need to be aware of.

8. CPU and RAM Usage

• Earlier in the article, we talked about CPU usage and CPU can be a bottleneck, but another thing that can be a bottleneck is the RAM.
• And your computer only has so much memory, and Mac calls it memory, available to run different applications.
• By closing these apps at the bottom of the screen, we took a lot of load off your Mac’s memory. But it means that only some of the programs that can be closed will be closed.

9. Cloud Storage Services

• In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, all these icons in the mini bar are also running.
• Some of them are Mac icons like Time Machine, which can’t turn that off, or the battery.
• But then over here on the left side, for instance, Dropbox. Cloud services, especially cloud storage services like Dropbox or Google Drive, can be especially memory intensive.
• Open Dropbox and click on the settings gear.
• And choose to quit it, which would close it.
• But I encourage you to open preferences and look for something like this checkbox in each case. Start Dropbox on system startup.

10. Google Drive

• In the top right corner, there is an option for Enabling or checking the background processes, there is a box to select Google Drive.
• I will uncheck that box to prevent the same problem from happening the next time I reboot my computer. I’ll close this window.
• You’ll notice it’s still up at the top so I will click on it.
• Then click the setting gear, then click Quit.
• Next one over, Google Drive. I like Google Drive, though; I’m going to lead get there because I know what it is. If you need to know what it is, close it. Login items. These are things that boot up when you log in.
• So Command + Space to open Spotlight. 
• There you go. Next, click Users & Groups.
• And you already selected the current user.
• Next, go to the Password tab. There’s the Login Items tab. Click on that.
• These items will open automatically when you log in.

11. Deleting Services and Apps

• Yes, look through this list. If you don’t want one of these things to open and run in the background, slow down your Mac.
• So for me, there are some apps that I do not need.
• Click on each app, and hit that minus button.
• You’ll see that a lot of these have this Hide check box.

12. Apple Menu

• The Apple menu is a great feature if you often use the Apple menu for navigating your apps and other files/folders. If you decide to handle it manually, you can save up a lot of space on your RAM.
• Go to settings and disable the Apple menu, this way, you can speed up your Mac.

13. Unnecessary tabs

• Unnecessary tabs can be a reason why the MacBook Pro M1 is slow. Having this many tabs open is bad because each open tab is like its own little program using your memory.
• Check the tabs and remove those unnecessary ones because they eat up the storage.
• Suppose you don’t need so many tabs open. To close the tab on your Mac, you can do Command + W to close that individual tab.
• Use Command + W to close all your tabs simultaneously. 
• Right-click or two-finger-click on one tab. And you have the option to close all tabs.

14. Unnecessary files

• Similarly, there can be a lot of junk files in your MAC, which might slow down your PC. Follow these steps to free up your MAC space.
• We will open the Activity Monitor again.
• Command + Space for Spotlight, act Return.
• You know how to get there. I sorted them by process name this time because I wanted to have them in alphabetical order.
• And on my Mac, you will see each one of these uses a little CPU.
• Every single one of these websites is right now. Let’s open the end of the tab. A little bit of CPU, a little bit of memory.

15. Remove Unwanted Apps

Have you ever observed that so many apps you don’t even use?

Cleaning your MAC can help you free up space because many of those apps are run in the background and take up space and your valuable RAM.

So, go ahead and delete the apps you don’t use anymore.

• Go to setting.
• Open Apps and games.
• Select the unwanted Apps.
• Click on delete and confirm.

16. Improving Mac’s Performance

• You can’t quit Finder, by the way.
• Tap the Apple menu in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, then tap App Store.
• You’ve got that Updates option. Click on that.
• Any available app updates you have will appear here. Your apps were updated recently.
• Ever since macOS Sierra, the Mac has run maintenance tasks on its own to keep things running smoothly.

17. Remove Unused Apps

• However, it needs some RAM and battery life to run those maintenance tests rather than just shutting down your Mac entirely.
• It’s a good idea to put it into sleep mode, plug it in, and make sure it’s charging.
• Just tap the Apple menu in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
• Tap Sleep.
• It’s also a good idea to shut down your Mac, maybe once a week, to give it a nice fresh start.
• Sleep mode doesn’t kill everything you saw in Activity Monitor, and start it all from scratch. It’s still there. It goes into hibernation mode but shutting it down does.
• So then it has to reload everything from scratch, which takes a little bit longer, but it also can fix problems like this.

18. Empty Caches

When you open the Photos app or the Mail app for the first time, or after you add a new account to the Mail app, a database has to be built for all those emails so that your Mac can access them quickly the next time. Same with Spotlight. For instance, when you turn on or update your software on the Mac, Spotlight reindexes it. So that’s another reason.

• Open settings.
• In the search bar, type the keyword cache.
• Tap on clear all or clear manually.

19. Free Hard Disk Space

Those are the background processes we’re talking about. But for instance, with the Mail app, if you quit it, it won’t keep indexing. So let that Mail app go and walk away for half an hour. Come back.

• All your emails will be there.
• Indexed, zippy. Same thing with the Photos app.
• Databases are involved.
• Hence, space can be freed up.

20. Slow internet connection

• Now let’s talk about what to do if it’s your internet connection, that’s slow.
• The first thing, turn Wi-Fi off and back on.
• Open Wi-Fi settings, and look for the baseball-diamond-looking thing in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
• If you don’t see it, check Control Center on a newer Mac by clicking on that. But most people will see this.
• You may see the turn Wi-Fi off.
• There is a switch so I will toggle it off and I will toggle it back on.
• You can fix this by toggling it on and off, we are talking about the connection between your computer and the router.

21. Taking a Speed Test

• If you’re concerned about your Wi-Fi speeds, try running a speed test.
• A speed test will also test the connection between the router, the modem, and your internet service provider.
• There can be problems where you need to get the speeds you should.
• So you could just Google speed test and tap on ‘Run Speed Test’.

Reviewing Speed Test

• I can see that my internet connection is 400 megabits down and 20 megabits up.
• But I only have 204 megabits downloaded on my Mac.
• That is normal. Unless you have an ethernet connection directly to your Wi-Fi router, it will not be as fast as it can go because Wi-Fi is not as fast as wired connections. This is not a problem.
• I am trying to figure out what the verbiage is for. And it says very slow or slow or awful. It’s probably not horrible.
• Also, try moving closer to your Wi-Fi router. It could be a Wi-Fi router problem. If you move closer and it gets faster, it’s not your Mac that has an issue; it is an issue with the website or software.

22. Wi-Fi problems

• You should also try to get the Wi-Fi network and set it up again.
• When your Mac connects to a Wi-Fi network, it saves information on how to connect to that Wi-Fi network.
• If something has changed, you should set it up like new. -How to do it?
• Click on that Wi-Fi icon at the top of the menu. Click on Network Preferences.
• Go to the bottom and click on Advanced.
• Then select the Wi-Fi network that you want to forget and click the minus button.
• Pro tip here. If you are still looking for your Wi-Fi network at the top, there’s no need to go through this whole list and like hunt and peck for it.
• Just tap anywhere in the search bar and type the first few letters of your Wi-Fi network.
• The first few letters of it, it’ll go right to it.
• Then you can tap that minus button.
• Then you will have to reconnect.
• Click on the Wi-Fi icon again in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and reselect your Wi-Fi network.
• You will have to Re-enter the password.

Conclusion

• It could also be a router issue.
• Try unplugging your router and plugging it back in.
• There’s also that reset button on the back of your router if things are really bad.

That’s for routers, though. If other devices are fast near the router and the Mac is so slow, it’s probably a Mac problem. It’s unlikely it could be a router problem.
It could be. That’s what to do when your Mac is slow. Hopefully, these tips sped it up for you.

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Last Updated on October 29, 2022 by Rojalin Mahapatro