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How to Make a Cold Boot on Mac Faster

Cold-booting your Mac shouldn't take two minutes. Here's how to slim down the boot path: kexts, snapshots, login items, and the daemons that stall first start.

7 min read

You shut your Mac down at the end of yesterday and powered it on this morning. The Apple logo appears, the progress bar inches across, and then the desktop sits there with a frozen menu bar for 90 seconds before anything is actually clickable. A modern Mac can cold-boot to a usable state in under 30 seconds — when nothing is fighting the boot path. Here’s how to clear the obstacles.

Cold boot vs warm boot

A cold boot starts from full power-off. The Mac reads from SSD, initializes the kernel and drivers, mounts APFS, runs system daemons, then starts your user session. A warm boot (after a recent restart or sleep) reuses some of this state and is typically much faster.

Most “my Mac is slow to start” complaints are about cold boots — first power-on of the day, after an update, or after a shutdown. The bottleneck is almost never CPU. It’s I/O, daemon startup, and login item churn.

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Audit login items aggressively

This is the single biggest boot-time win. After login, macOS launches every app in your login items, plus every background helper. With 15 things autostarting, you’re waiting on all of them.

  1. System Settings > General > Login Items
  2. Open at Login — these are visible apps that auto-launch (Spotify, Slack, etc.)
  3. Allow in the Background — these are daemons (Dropbox, Adobe, browser helpers, old uninstall leftovers)

Remove or disable:

  • Apps you don’t use daily
  • Daemons from apps you’ve uninstalled (very common)
  • Update agents from rarely-used apps
  • Cloud sync clients you don’t actively use on this Mac

Each item removed shaves several seconds off the post-boot wait.

Clean LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons

Some background services aren’t visible in Login Items. They live in:

  • ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ — per-user, runs at login
  • /Library/LaunchAgents/ — system-wide, runs at login for all users
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/ — runs at boot, before login

Open these in Finder. The .plist filenames usually identify the app (com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist and so on). Anything for an app you’ve deleted is dead weight that the system tries to start at boot.

Sweep’s app uninstaller tracks down and removes orphaned launch agents and daemons. Manual cleanup works but is tedious and easy to mess up.

Free up disk space

A nearly-full SSD slows boot. macOS uses free disk for swap, snapshots during login, and intermediate caches. Aim to keep at least 20% free.

Quick wins:

  • Empty Trash
  • Clear Downloads of old installers and files
  • Delete old APFS snapshots (especially after recent macOS updates)
  • Remove unused apps with their leftover support files

Delete old APFS snapshots

After macOS updates, after Time Machine backups, and during install rollbacks, macOS creates APFS snapshots. They accumulate and make boot prep slower as the system enumerates them.

List them:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Delete one (replace the timestamp):

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2024-12-01-120000

Or, simpler: toggle Time Machine off briefly to flush all local snapshots at once.

Tip: If your Mac stalls on the Apple logo for a long time before the progress bar moves, the issue is firmware/early-boot, not user-space. Hardware diagnostics or an SMC reset (Intel) may help. Apple Silicon doesn't have manual SMC resets — those are handled automatically.

Disable “Reopen windows when logging back in”

By default, when you shut down or restart, macOS tries to reopen all the apps and windows that were open. If you had Chrome with 80 tabs and Photoshop with a big PSD, your next boot will spend a minute reopening all that.

Turn off:

  • When confirming a shutdown or restart, uncheck Reopen windows when logging back in

Or, after the fact:

  • Delete ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist — this clears the saved-session list

Reduce iCloud post-login work

Right after login, iCloud syncs whatever changed since the Mac was last on. With many iCloud features enabled (Drive, Photos, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Calendar), this is a lot of network and CPU activity competing with everything else.

If you don’t actively use some iCloud features on this Mac, turn them off:

  • System Settings > Apple ID
  • Toggle off iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, etc. that you don’t use here

You’ll still have these on your iPhone, just not on this Mac.

Reset font and kernel caches (if needed)

Corrupted caches can stall boot. If you’ve recently:

  • Installed a lot of fonts
  • Installed a kernel extension (rare on Apple Silicon)
  • Restored from a backup

…clearing caches helps.

Font cache rebuild:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Reboot after. The first boot rebuilds the cache and may be slower; subsequent boots are faster.

For most Macs that haven’t done anything unusual, you don’t need this step. Only run it if you have a specific suspicion.

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Check disk health

Failing or struggling SSDs cause slow boots first. Apple Silicon Macs run on soldered SSDs that don’t fail often, but it does happen.

Check:

  • Apple menu > About This Mac > More Info > System Report > Storage
  • Look for the internal SSD’s S.M.A.R.T. status: should be Verified

If it’s not verified, take it to Apple as soon as you can — boot will keep getting slower.

Boot in Safe Mode to compare

If you want to know whether a boot issue is third-party software or system, boot in Safe Mode:

  • Apple Silicon: hold the power button until “Loading startup options” appears, select your disk, hold Shift, click Continue in Safe Mode
  • Intel: hold Shift while booting

Safe Mode skips third-party kernel extensions and login items. If boot is fast in Safe Mode, your issue is in third-party software (login items, agents). If it’s slow in Safe Mode too, the issue is closer to the OS or hardware.

Update macOS

Apple ships boot-time improvements regularly. If you’re still on macOS 13 or earlier, updating to 14/15 can meaningfully speed up boot, especially on Apple Silicon. Run:

  • System Settings > General > Software Update

A cold-boot speedup checklist

Run through this once and your Mac will cold-boot dramatically faster:

  1. Audit Open at Login — remove non-essentials
  2. Audit Allow in the Background — disable orphans
  3. Clean LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons (or use Sweep’s uninstaller)
  4. Free up disk space, delete old snapshots
  5. Disable Reopen windows when logging back in
  6. Turn off unused iCloud features
  7. Reboot and time it

Most Macs go from a 90-second usable-desktop time to under 25 seconds. The hardware was always quick. It was just waiting on a queue of things you didn’t realize were running.

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