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Why your Mac is slow right after you start it up

· 6 min read

A Mac is slow right after startup because everything that opens at login starts at the same moment: your login items, background helpers, and macOS’s own services such as Spotlight and iCloud. They all compete for the processor and the disk until they have finished setting up. For most Macs this settles in a few minutes. If yours takes much longer, the fix is to trim the list of things that start with it.

Here is what is happening, how to see it, and how to cut it down.

What starts when your Mac starts

Logging in kicks off several groups of work at once.

  • Login items. Apps you set to open at login, such as a chat client, a cloud storage app or a menu bar tool.
  • Background items. Helpers that apps register to run without a window: updaters, sync agents, menu bar utilities. Many are added when you install an app, and you may never have seen them.
  • macOS’s own services. Spotlight catches up on files that changed. iCloud connects and syncs. Your notification, Siri and Apple ID services start up. Photos and other apps may wake their helpers.
  • Reopened windows. If you let apps reopen their windows at login, they load their documents too.

Each piece is reasonable alone. Together they ask the disk and the processor for a lot at the same instant, so the Mac feels sluggish until the queue clears. A Mac with a slower disk, or not much free space on it, feels it most.

Give it a few minutes first

Some of the slowness is simply normal warm-up. The first few minutes after login are the busiest, and the Mac usually calms down once the setup work finishes. Before you change anything:

  1. Wait five minutes after the desktop appears.
  2. Do not launch big apps in that time, if you can help it. Opening a browser with many tabs on top of everything else makes the queue longer.
  3. Check again. If it is still slow after ten minutes, there is something to trim or something stuck.

If this happens after a macOS update, rather than on every start, it is likely catch-up work. Why is my Mac slow after a macOS update? covers that.

See what is running at startup

The built-in place to look is System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions (called Login Items on macOS 14). Under Open at Login it lists the apps that open when you log in, and you remove one with the minus button. Under Allow in the Background it lists the items allowed to run in the background, each with a switch; turning a switch off stops that item from running in the background. It is a good first look, and it needs no other software.

It does not tell you how much each one uses, though, and some background items show a developer’s name rather than an app’s, which can be hard to match up.

Foreman has a Startup Apps page for this. It lists everything that opens at login or runs in the background: login items, launch agents and daemons, and background items that apps register, grouped by the app each belongs to and shown with readable names. Each has a status, such as Enabled or Disabled, and “Impact now” shows whether it is running and how much it uses. You can Disable or Enable an item from the list. System daemons need an administrator password to change.

Two things to know about how it reads them:

  • Login items are read through System Events, so macOS asks once for permission to control it.
  • With Full Disk Access, Foreman can also read the switches in System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions (Allow in the Background). Without it, Foreman shows a note you can skip. Items an app registered through macOS’s own login items interface can only be switched in System Settings, and Foreman opens it there for you.

What to trim, and what to leave

You are not trying to turn everything off. Use a simple test for each item: do I need this running the moment I log in?

Good candidates to turn off:

  • Apps you only use now and then, which can open when you need them.
  • Updaters and helpers for apps you rarely use.
  • Chat, music and cloud apps you do not want open all day.
  • Anything marked “Program missing”. That is a leftover from an app you deleted. Its program is gone, so there is nothing left for it to start; it only clutters the list. Foreman can remove these one at a time with Remove…, or all at once with Clean Up Leftovers, and their files go to the Trash. How to remove login items left behind by deleted apps goes through it.

Leave these alone:

  • Anything that belongs to macOS or to your security software.
  • Drivers and helpers for hardware you use every day, such as a printer, a mouse or an audio interface, if the maker’s app is what makes it work.
  • Sync tools you depend on, such as cloud storage you need in Finder, unless you are happy to open them by hand.

If you are unsure about an item, disable it and restart. You can switch it on again from the same list, and nothing is deleted when you disable it. Is it safe to disable startup items on a Mac? has more on judging which are safe.

Trim, restart, compare

  1. Open the list and disable only the items you are sure you do not need at login. A few is enough to start.
  2. Restart.
  3. Wait the same few minutes and see whether the Mac feels better.
  4. Repeat with a few more if it helps.

Go slowly. If you disable twenty things at once and something stops working, you will not know which one it was. Short batches let you undo one change at a time.

If it is still slow

If the Mac is still slow after the list is trimmed:

  • Look at what is busy. Open Foreman with Control-Shift-Escape and sort the Processes page by CPU, or by Disk, in the first minutes after login. If an app or a background process stays on top, work out what it is. How to see which app is using the most CPU on a Mac shows how.
  • Use Efficiency Mode on an app you want open at login but do not need straight away. In the background it runs at background priority and in short bursts, held to about a quarter of the processor time it would otherwise take, and at full speed whenever it is in front or playing sound. Foreman remembers the setting for that app.
  • Check your free disk space. A nearly full disk slows start-up and indexing. System Settings > General > Storage shows what is using it.
  • Check how long the Mac has been up. Foreman’s Performance page shows it under CPU. A Mac that has not been restarted for weeks can behave worse than one restarted now and then, and a fresh start gives you a baseline for comparison.

Foreman is $12 once, works on up to 3 Macs, and is free for 24 hours. In that time you can walk through the Startup Apps list on your own Mac, turn off what you do not need, and see whether the next startup feels better.