Sometimes your Mac can take more time to wake up than usual, but that time should not be counted in minutes, and if it happens frequently, then your Mac needs attention. And the good news is that such situations can be easily treated, so you do not have to buy another laptop.
Check for a full disk, too many startup apps, one runaway process, or leftover files, as these are the major causes of such problems.
Here are the eight applications that are built to treat different causes. Run the first two free checks first, and it is expected that your problem will be treated to troubleshoot unbootable Mac systems.
There’s rarely a single culprit. A nearly full startup disk is the usual suspect, but apps that launch at login without permission, a browser hogging memory, and background processes keeping the CPU busy all take their turn. Then come the leftovers: delete an app and its additional files often stay behind, quietly stacking up.
Storage first. Open System Settings > General > Storage and look at that bar. If it’s nearly full, you may have found the whole issue. Next, hop over to Login Items & Extensions and turn off anything that has no business launching at startup. A lot of Mac computers are noticeably faster after just those two steps.
Finding the cause is the most important thing you should consider before randomly guessing the cause of hogging:
It’s built into macOS, so there’s nothing to install: open Applications > Utilities and launch it. Click the CPU tab and sort by % CPU, and a runaway app will jump straight to the top. Do the same on the Memory tab if something has ballooned. Delete the offender and move on.
The catch is that it only reports. It won’t fix anything, so the reading and the selection are up to you.
Stats is an open-source monitor that lives in your menu bar and shows CPU, GPU, memory, disk, and network activity at a glance. It requires macOS 12 or newer, and you can install it with brew install stats or from a DMG.
Where Stats earns its place is catching a spike the moment it occurs. The project itself warns that the Sensors and Bluetooth modules use the most CPU, so turn them off till you need them.
iStat Menus is Stats with a good coat of paint, and you pay for it. CPU, memory, disks, network, and sensors are already there, and the memory view shows pressure, compressed memory, and swap. It requires macOS 13 or later. There’s a 14-day free trial if you want to kick the tires.
Worth paying for if you want detailed history and lots of customization. If you’d only look at it a couple of times a week, Stats will do.
Memory Clean 3 lives in the menu bar. It uses inactive memory and shows which apps are using the most of it. You can also set it to notify you when an app has been resting for a certain length of time. Use it after you close something heavy, such as a big visual project. Apps may feel a bit sluggish for a few seconds afterward while the purged cache regenerates, so don’t leave it running for days.
Cleaning your laptop is important, and these applications do that very conveniently:
If storage is what’s lagging your Mac, DaisyDisk draws your disk as an interactive map. You see which folders are consuming space and drag the big ones to delete. It costs $9.99 once, covers up to five of your personal Macs, and works on macOS 10.13 or newer.
Great for tracking down useless video exports and forgotten backups. But it only finds and removes files, so it can’t help with slowdowns that have no relation to space.
Dragging an app to the Trash leaves its support files, caches, and preferences behind. AppCleaner, a small free app, fixes that: drop an app on its window, look over the previous files it finds, and delete each of them together. Version 3.7 supports macOS 15 and later, and older versions exist for outdated systems.
Uninstallers vary in how thorough they are and what extras arrive bundled. AppCleaner does one job well. It won’t clean caches or scan for viruses, though.
These applications support keeping your whole system tidy:
OnyX is a free utility by Titanium Software. Through a simple interface, it verifies system files, clears caches, and regenerates databases and indexes, so you skip the Terminal commands.
Watch the version you install. Every release is built for one major macOS version, and the developer advises against running one made for the latest system. It also suits people who are comfortable with system internals, because some options change how macOS runs.
Most tools on this list do a single job, but CleanMyMac does many. Its Smart Care scan covers deep cleaning, threat scanning, performance boosting, software updates, and storage decluttering. It requires macOS 11 or later. Its Uninstaller removes apps together with their leftover files. For a detailed view, see this comparison of the best app uninstallers for Mac.
It is a subscription, which can feel like a lot for something you’d run at a time in a while. If a single fix is all you’re after, one of the free tools above is definitely the better deal.
If you like handling things yourself, Activity Monitor, Stats, and OnyX cost nothing and cover a lot of ground. If storage is your main issue, DaisyDisk gets you answers fastest. If your Mac is filled with apps you no longer use and you want to delete messages on your Mac, an uninstaller will help more than any memory tool.
If you’d rather have one app that runs many checks at once, a combined suite saves time. Whichever way you lean, spot the cause first and pick the tool second.
Ans: Best apps to speed up a Mac are Activity Monitor, AppCleaner, DaisyDisk, OnyX, and CleanMyMac.
Ans: Mac can become faster by restarting, installing pending macOS updates, checking available storage, and using Activity Monitor to identify resource-intensive processes and applications.
Ans: macOS already includes tools for managing storage and monitoring system performance, so third-party apps are not necessary.
