How to Make Mac Boot Faster (Cold and Warm Starts)

You’ve timed it — your Mac takes 70 seconds from power button to a usable desktop, and another 30 after a restart. Two minutes of your morning gone before you’ve answered a single email. The good news: most boot slowness is fixable, and the things slowing cold boots are slightly different from the things slowing warm boots. Knowing the difference saves you time.

Here’s how to speed up both.

Cold vs warm boots: what changes

A cold boot starts from full power-off. The Mac:

1. Initializes firmware, runs early checks
2. Loads the kernel and drivers
3. Mounts APFS, runs system daemons
4. Starts user session, login items, daemons

A warm boot (restart from a running system) skips some of step 1 and reuses some kernel/cache state. It’s typically 30-40% faster than a cold boot on the same Mac.

A wake from sleep is faster still — almost everything stays in RAM. If you’re sleeping at end-of-day, that’s the fastest morning boot you can have.

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What slows both: login items and background daemons

This is the biggest bucket regardless of boot type. After login, macOS launches everything in your Login Items, plus all background helpers.

Audit:

1. System Settings > General > Login Items
2. Open at Login: visible apps that auto-launch
3. Allow in the Background: silent helpers and daemons

Common bloat:

• Spotify, Slack, Discord (autostart by default)
• Steam, Epic, other game launchers
• Old VPN clients
• Cloud storage from apps you don’t use anymore
• Adobe Creative Cloud manager
• Update agents from rarely-used apps

Each item removed shaves seconds. Going from 15 login items to 4 typically cuts your time-to-usable by 20-30 seconds.

What slows cold boots specifically

Cold boots are I/O-bound. The Mac is reading lots of small files from SSD into memory. Things that hurt:

• Nearly-full SSD: macOS uses free space for boot operations
• APFS snapshot count: more snapshots = more enumeration work
• Corrupted caches: kernel cache, font cache, dyld cache
• Outdated firmware: Apple Silicon Macs benefit from current macOS for boot speed

Apple Silicon Macs cold-boot fast — usually under 30 seconds to a usable state. If yours is 60+ seconds and the desktop sits frozen for half of that, you’ve got cleanup to do.

What slows warm boots specifically

Warm boots reuse state, so they’re more sensitive to:

• “Reopen windows when logging back in”: macOS tries to reopen apps you had open before restart
• App-state crud: apps that didn’t quit cleanly before the restart
• Stuck or hung apps: macOS waits for them to respond before continuing

If your warm boots are slow, it’s often the apps you had open before the restart. Browsers with many tabs, big editor projects, Photoshop with a huge file — all of these slow down the warm boot.

Disable “Reopen windows when logging back in”

Easy fix. When you restart or shut down via the Apple menu, uncheck Reopen windows when logging back in. macOS remembers this for next time.

Or after the fact, delete the saved-session file:

• ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist

This stops macOS from trying to relaunch your previous session.

Free up disk space

A full SSD slows everything, boots especially. Aim for 20% free.

Quick wins:

• Empty Trash
• Clear Downloads
• Delete old APFS snapshots (see below)
• Remove unused apps and their leftovers

Sweep’s smart scan organizes everything by size and shows what’s safe to delete.

Delete APFS snapshots

After macOS updates, Time Machine backups, and various background operations, the system creates APFS snapshots. They accumulate. The boot process enumerates and validates them, slowing things down.

List them:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Delete a specific one (replace timestamp):

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2024-11-15-120000

Or wipe all by toggling Time Machine off briefly in System Settings > General > Time Machine.

Remove orphan LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons

Beyond visible Login Items, macOS runs services configured in:

• ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/

Apps you’ve uninstalled often leave their launch agents behind. The system still tries to start them at boot, even though the underlying app is gone. Each failed attempt is a small delay.

Sweep’s app uninstaller automatically scans for orphan launch agents and removes them. Manually cleaning these requires checking each .plist filename and matching it to an app.

Quit cleanly before shutdown

If you reboot frequently for any reason (developer doing fresh installs, lots of macOS updates), the cleaner the shutdown, the faster the warm boot.

Habits that help:

• Cmd+Q apps before restarting; don’t rely on macOS quitting them for you
• Save documents (avoid macOS having to wait on save dialogs)
• Disconnect external drives before shutdown if possible
• Don’t shut down while a backup is in progress

Update macOS

Apple ships boot-time fixes regularly. If you’ve been holding back from a current macOS, check whether updates would help:

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) was a meaningful boot speed improvement over 13
• macOS 15 (Sequoia) maintains and sometimes improves on it

System Settings > General > Software Update. The update itself takes 20-40 minutes; subsequent boots are usually faster.

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Use sleep, not shutdown, for daily use

For most users, putting the Mac to sleep at end-of-day is faster than shutting it down. Wake from sleep happens in 1-2 seconds. Even Apple Silicon’s instant-on is dramatically faster than any boot.

Reasons to actually shut down:

• After installing a macOS update
• If you won’t use the Mac for several days
• Travel through airport security with strict policies
• Troubleshooting weird behavior

Otherwise, just close the lid (laptops) or let the display sleep (desktops).

Check Activity Monitor right after login

A great habit: leave Activity Monitor in your dock. Right after login, glance at it. Whatever’s pegged at 100% CPU for the first minute is what’s slowing your post-boot experience.

Common culprits:

• mds_stores and mdworker — Spotlight catching up
• backupd — Time Machine starting
• Browser updaters and Chrome auto-updates
• Adobe daemons checking for updates
• Photo analysis or Mail indexing

If you see one of these consuming everything, the fix isn’t to make boot faster — it’s to disable or schedule that specific process for a more convenient time.

A boot-speedup checklist for both cold and warm

1. Audit Login Items, both lists, remove anything non-essential
2. Clean orphan LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons
3. Disable “Reopen windows when logging back in”
4. Free up at least 20% of your SSD
5. Delete old APFS snapshots
6. Use sleep instead of shutdown for daily use
7. Update macOS to current version
8. Reboot and time it — should be under 30 seconds to usable

Combined, these changes typically take a Mac from 90+ seconds of boot frustration to under 25 seconds of clean startup. The hardware is up to it. You just need to clear the path.