I just upgraded my 2023 MB Air 15" to Sonoma.
I frequently deep clean my Mac using CleanmymacX and occasionally run Onyx.
So all the cookies, cashes etc etc etc are cleaned out. Including a restart of my Mac.
Last night I upgraded from Sonoma to macOS Sequoia and notice a remarkable change in how snappy and fast everything got.
What else did Apple clean out during the upgrade to the new OS?
There must be something more I can do to keep it as fast as it it now.
It’s possible that some parts of the OS have been streamlined, some underlying process which affects lots of standard functionality e.g. I imagine that if writing data to memory was improved by 5% through software (somehow) that it would be pretty noticable in lots of ways. That may be a stupid example, but you catch my drift hopefully.
It’s also possible that visual changes make it feel snappier (I always remember about 15 years ago, I’d turn off the UI’s default behaviour of having shadows on everything which slowed the UI down)
I wouldn’t rule out the Placebo effect though where, because you know something’s changed, you think things are snappier which are not. The number of times in an IT role, we’d perform an upgrade and people would come out of the woodwork stating that things had got worse which were either true before the upgrade, or nothing was worse, but because people were aware of the upgrade, they’d start noticing things which would have gone under the radar previously.
Removing caches actually slows down your machine. Or at least it doesn’t help to speed it up.
Cache decreases data access times, reduces latency and improves input/output (I/O).
Source: Techtarget
Sequoia is so much slower for me. Lots of laggy animations.
Indeed but they will be rebuild once you open the application again so after that it’s taking advantage of the cash again
They will, but that takes time as they’re only built as the app uses data. As others say, you’re slowing applications down by doing it.
Good applications manage their own caches by limiting their sizes, implementing time since last used controls and when limits are reached, removing data which is seldom used, so there’s no need to clean them out.
My experience has been that things usually feel slower after an OS upgrade. Sometimes they’re dramatically slower. That may be in part because I tend to keep machines for a long time.
When I upgraded my 2013 MacBook Pro from Sierra (released 2016) to High Sierra (2017) Spaces became almost unusable because those animations became so, so painfully slow. I know that this machine doesn’t have great graphics, but having difficulty running an OS that is only 4 years newer seems wrong.
More recently, my iMac Pro (2017) was fine running Mojave (2018). When I finally upgraded to Sonoma (2023) it was like dipping it in molasses. Third party app launches, in particular, are dramatically and painfully slower. I don’t hear that from owners of newer Macs. Maybe there’s hardware in M-series chips that makes verification/launch faster that the OS is now optimized to expect and use? I also now hear the fans much more frequently than I did before the upgrade. At any rate I’m with the slower crowd. Grumph…
Check in the activity monitor if MD Worker is running a high %.
Could be that spotlight is reindexing.
I would guess it’s faster SSDs which ship as standard in newer macs, and M series chips being significantly faster than Intel chips at Single core operation.
This is always a risk with running older hardware (and anything over 5 years has to be defined as old) Your iMac pro is undoubtedly a fine machine and will still do a job for lots of people, but if you’re doing remotely Prosumer/Pro in nature, a 7 year old computer will not be fit for purpose unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time waiting.
I suspect that this is the last year we will see support for any intel computer, with all dropped next year. It would make sense if M4 Max and Ultra Studios and released and maybe even an updated and more useful Mac Pro released too.