I watched the recent WWDC keynote where Apple launched a bunch of new products. One of them was the high end mac aimed at the professional sector. This was a computer designed to process hours of high definition video footage for movies/TV. As per usual, they boasted about how many processes you could run at the same time, and how they’d all be done instantaneously, compared to the previous model or the leading competitor.
Meanwhile my 10 year old iMac takes 30 seconds to show the File menu when I click File. Or it takes 5 minutes to run a simple bash command in Terminal. It’s not taking 5 minutes to compile something or do anything particularly difficult. It takes 5 minutes to remember what bash is in the first place.
I know why it couldn’t process video footage without catching fire, but what I truly don’t understand is why it takes so long to do the easiest most mundane things.
I’m not working with 50 apps open, or a browser laden down with 200 tabs. I don’t have intensive image editing software running. There’s no malware either. I’m just trying to use it to do every day tasks. This has happened with every computer I’ve ever owned.
Why?
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If you go and take a look at older versions of software that you use regularly, you’ll notice that the early installer files are usually smaller. That’s because over time, as the developer adds features and bugfixes, the code gets bigger and bigger. More code means more things the software is checking for, accounting for, etc. So if you continue to patch/update software on your computer while keeping the hardware the same, it’s going to struggle to handle that extra code.
Operating systems get more demanding over time because new hardware is better. Also software gets more demanding too. And there is not really that big of push to optimize it, as new hardware can handle it.
Also video files etc. are over time higher resolution, bigger bitrate etc.
Also you probably have HDD in it which is slow compared to SSD.
I get this sometimes, and it’s usually because the Mac makes indexing files of everything you do on your Mac, to make getting there again faster. Problem is, it’s a double edge sword, and by trying to load those files, it slows down your machine. This can also be made harder by using up almost all of your HD space on the Mac, as it stores and access these files from there as well as the RAM.
First port of call; restart your Mac and uncheck the “reload applications when restarted” or whatever it says, that will cut down on some memory loss.
Second; make a new non administrative account on the Mac and log into it. If everything loads and runs fine on there, like clicking file etc, then it’s specifically your user account that is bogging down your performance.
Third; take it to your local Apple Store. Even if they don’t need to repair anything, they can run tests on the HD and other components that might help identify if something is slowing down the Mac for you. But make sure you have a recent back up of your data, as some options they offer might need to restore your HD, or they might need to replace the HD all together. So be prepared with your data backed up elsewhere.
Good luck OP! 🤙
Imagine you’re in a house – nice, clean, and fresh. When you look for stuff, you can find it quickly. Now imagine you’ve lived in the house for a while, things have piled up, and sure you keep it clean on the face of things, but when you gotta search for stuff in cabinets and what not it takes a little bit longer to sort through the stuff that accumulates.
Now most people’s computers would probably look like hoarder homes, and trying to move through one of those or look for something specific is a slow ordeal.
Check your temps. Thermal paste goes bad over time. If you‘re not an imbecile who trashed his pc with malware, bloatware etc. and your hdd is still fine this is the reason. Replace the hdd with an ssd anyway though.
There are maintenance programs you can run on your Mac that sort out a lot of issues that pop up from time to time. Onyx is a great tool that fixes a lot of glitchy things that can slow your computer down. It repairs permission, cleans caches and a tonne of other stuff.
It’s free. No nagware or ads. It’s been my go-to for at least 15 years.
[https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html](https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html)
Edit: I am using a 15 year old Mac tower (early 2008) with Mojave. It’s not a hack to get that OS running. It was released by a clever guy who bypasses Apple’s little check that the OS is too old for that processor. It still works great, and is my main music production tool. Web browsing is slowly now becoming an issue due to browsers not being supported anymore on that OS. But the machine is still very snappy. No issues. Most things work just fine, minimal delays.
It can be done.
This used to be a thing on computers with Microsoft Windows. I’d just completely wipe the computer every 1-2 years and do a fresh install of the OS to fix it.
There is absolutely no technical reason that a 10 year old computer can’t do what you are describing in a reasonable time.
Get all of you files and things like browser bookmarks and other program settings or data off the computer to a flash drive or something. This may take a little thinking and time to decide what you want or need to keep. Take care and make sure everything you want to keep is off the computer. On the other hand, it is 10 years old and you might be able to just copy the entire contents of the hard drive to some cheap USB drive at this point.
Then re-install the operating system fresh.
Software is continuously designed and updated to be more feature rich as time progresses, because there’s an implicit understanding that the average computing power of all computers will increase year over year as people gradually adopt newer, more powerful machines.
This means that old hardware will see more and more strain as time goes one because the software becomes more demanding, which will cause it to slow down.
If you were to freeze a brand new computer and never update or add any software, its performance will remain rock steady until it starts to physically fail (probably storage first).
I still use my first gaming PC I built like a decade and a half ago (Phenom II X4) and it still runs like a brand new PC. Even still play newer releases with it (I did drop a used GPU into it a few years ago)
Computers don’t need to slow down. It’s a great daily driver still. In fact when my brothers company’s computers for compromised last year they borrow it for a while lol.
People are saying never update, never had a problem there. It’s up to date windows 10 currently.
A lot of great answers on the software side. But on the hardware side, it’s typically due to heat. Cooling components wear out over time. Thermal compound dries up. Fan bearings wear down and can’t run as efficiently anymore. Dust accumulates and obstructs air flow.
Most modern hardware has safeguards put in place to throttle performance once it hits a certain threshold. Poor cooling will cause a device to operate at levels far below what it’s actually capable of.
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