AI Mac CleanerIs your Mac slow? Seven checks before you buy a new one
Most slow Macs are not old, they are full, busy or misconfigured. Work through these checks in order and you will usually find the cause.
A Mac that feels slow is rarely worn out. Before pricing a new machine, spend ten minutes on these checks. They go from most likely to least.
1. Free space
Under 10% free and macOS struggles to swap memory and write caches. Check Get Info on Macintosh HD. If you are low, free up space first; everything else waits.
2. Memory pressure
Open Activity Monitor, click Memory, and look at the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom. Yellow or red means the Mac is swapping to disk. Sort by Memory to find the culprit. Browsers with many tabs, Electron apps (Slack, Teams, Discord) and virtual machines are the usual suspects. Quit what you are not using.
3. Something eating the CPU
In Activity Monitor, click CPU and sort by % CPU. A process pinned near 100% that you do not recognise is worth a search. Common ones: Spotlight indexing after a big change (mds_stores, it finishes on its own), photo analysis (photoanalysisd), and a stuck browser tab.
4. Login items and background helpers
System Settings › General › Login Items. Every entry starts at boot and stays in memory. Apps you no longer use, updaters for software you removed, and helpers you never asked for all belong off.
5. Too many browser extensions
Each extension runs on every page. Disable all of them, restart the browser, and add back the ones you miss.
6. Heat
A hot Mac slows itself down on purpose. Blocked vents, a lap or a bed, or a dying fan will do it. If it is always hot, check for a runaway process (step 3) first.
7. Old macOS or a pending update
Updates fix performance bugs and, on older versions, Safari and Spotlight can spin waiting for services that changed. Install pending updates and restart; a restart alone clears leaked memory that has built up over weeks of sleep.
When it really is the hardware
If the Mac has a spinning hard drive (pre-2018 iMacs and some older MacBooks), that is the bottleneck and nothing else will help much. 8 GB of memory is tight for heavy browser use in 2026 but workable with discipline. Everything else on this list is free to fix.
AI Mac Cleaner's Performance screen shows free space, memory pressure, the apps using the most memory and your login items on one page, and Smart Scan handles the space part.