Speed up your Mac
How to Speed Up macOS Monterey (12) on Older Macs
Monterey on a 2015 or 2017 Mac feels rough. Here's a real, hardware-aware guide to making it bearable, including the SafariBookmarks daemon trick.
A 2015 MacBook Pro running Monterey shouldn’t be slow, but most of them are. The hardware is fine for what people use it for — Mail, Safari, Pages, video calls. The OS just isn’t tuned for it the way Big Sur was, and Apple’s update cadence stopped including performance fixes for Monterey after the security patches in late 2024.
If you’re on Monterey because that’s the newest version your Mac supports, here’s the realistic playbook.
What Monterey actually changed
Monterey (macOS 12) introduced a few features that matter for older-Mac performance:
- Universal Control — runs
RemoteManagementdaemoneven when no other Apple devices are nearby. The daemon is small but persistent. - Live Text in Photos and Preview uses
mediaanalysisdto OCR images. Heavy first-run pass when you upgrade. - Focus modes replaced Do Not Disturb. The new system has more processes (
focusmodesd, etc). - Shortcuts app on Mac added a daemon (
shortcutsd) that runs even with zero shortcuts configured. - Safari 15 redesign caused widespread complaints; Safari 16 (which Monterey can run) fixed most of them.
Knowing what’s new in Monterey helps because most “Monterey is slow” complaints map back to one of those daemons.
Step 1: Get on the latest 12.7.x release
System Settings → Software Update. Make sure you’re on at least 12.7.x — earlier 12.x releases had performance regressions that were fixed in the late point releases.
If your Mac no longer offers Monterey updates, check Apple’s security update page directly. Sometimes the standalone installer (.pkg) is available even when the in-OS update prompt isn’t.
Step 2: Activity Monitor — the older-Mac watch list
After restart, open Activity Monitor. CPU tab. Sort by % CPU. Watch for a full minute.
On Monterey-era Macs, the suspects are:
mediaanalysisd— Live Text and Photos analysis. Will finish; let it.mds_stores— Spotlight reindex. Below.kernel_task— high here means thermal throttling. Critical on 2015–2017 MacBook Pros with aged thermal paste.WindowServer— high means external monitor or transparency settings.bird/cloudd— iCloud Drive sync. Pause if you’re cleaning up.SafariBookmarksSyncAgent— surprisingly heavy if you have a lot of bookmarks synced from iCloud. The fix is to log out and back into iCloud.
If kernel_task is consistently above 200% on a quad-core Intel, that’s not software. The Mac is throttling because it’s hot. Address the thermals (clean fan vents, replace thermal paste, run on a hard surface) before software tweaks.
Free up RAM in one clickSweep frees inactive memory and pauses runaway processes. Get Sweep free →
Step 3: Login items — be brutal
System Preferences → Users & Groups → Login Items.
On older Macs with limited RAM (8GB and below), every background app costs something. Cut anything you don’t use within five minutes of starting work:
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Microsoft AutoUpdate (you can update Office manually)
- Dropbox / Google Drive (close while you work, reopen on demand)
- Logitech Options (only needed for non-default mouse buttons)
- Slack (open it when you need it)
- Zoom (launch it for the meeting; quit it after)
You can always re-enable. The goal is to find which ones you actually need every day.
Step 4: RAM is the real ceiling
If you have 4GB or 8GB on this Mac, no software tweak will give you the experience of having 16GB. What you can do is make sure the RAM you have isn’t being wasted.
Open Activity Monitor → Memory tab. Look at “Memory Pressure” at the bottom. Color tells you everything:
- Green — fine, no swap pressure
- Yellow — under pressure, swapping to disk regularly
- Red — saturated, the Mac is essentially a slideshow
If yellow or red is your normal state, the fix is fewer concurrent apps. Quit what you’re not using right now. Close browser tabs. Close idle Word documents.
Step 5: Safari vs Chrome on older hardware
On a 4GB or 8GB Intel Mac running Monterey, browser choice matters more than anywhere else.
- Safari 16 on Monterey is the most efficient browser by a wide margin. Each tab uses less RAM than Chrome by 30–50%.
- Chrome is the worst offender. A 4GB Mac with Chrome running ten tabs is in red memory pressure constantly.
- Firefox sits in the middle.
If you’re on a memory-constrained older Mac, switch your daily-driver browser to Safari. The difference is night and day.
Step 6: Cache cleanup
The Monterey cache offenders, in typical-size order:
- Xcode DerivedData if you’ve ever built an iOS project
- Browser caches for whatever you use
- Slack cache
- Spotify cache
- Old iOS backups in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ - Mail Envelope Index if it’s gotten corrupted
Quit each app, drag its cache folder to Trash, empty Trash.
The iOS backup folder deserves special attention. If you’ve used this Mac to back up an iPhone or iPad over the years, you likely have 30–60GB of old backups in there. iTunes/Finder doesn’t auto-delete the old ones. Open Finder, hit the folder, sort by size, keep the most recent and delete the rest.
Step 7: Visual effects off
These matter more on older hardware than on M-series.
- System Preferences → Accessibility → Display → Reduce motion: on
- System Preferences → Accessibility → Display → Reduce transparency: on
- System Preferences → Dock & Menu Bar → Minimize windows using: Scale effect
- System Preferences → Dock & Menu Bar → uncheck Animate opening applications
On Iris and Iris Pro graphics (most pre-2018 Macs), turning off transparency alone reclaims 5–10% of available GPU time.
Step 8: Spotlight reindex if needed
If mds_stores is hammering the disk for hours, force a clean rebuild:
sudo mdutil -E /
Then exclude folders that don’t need indexing. On older Macs especially, telling Spotlight not to index Xcode build outputs, video archives, and big media drives saves real CPU time.
Step 9: Reset SMC and NVRAM
On Intel Macs with T2 chip (most 2018+):
- SMC: shut down. Hold Control+Option (left) + Shift (right) for 7 seconds. Continue holding those plus power button for 7 more seconds. Release, boot.
- NVRAM: shut down. Press power, immediately hold Option+Cmd+P+R for 20 seconds.
On older Intel Macs (pre-T2), the SMC reset is different — search for your specific model. The NVRAM reset is the same.
These fix a lot of weird “everything feels off” symptoms.
Step 10: Consider an external SSD boot drive
For 2014–2015 iMacs and any Mac with a Fusion Drive or 5400rpm spinner, the disk is the bottleneck. Booting from a USB-C SSD often gives those Macs a second life.
A $50 1TB external SSD plus 30 minutes installing Monterey on it makes a 2014 iMac feel like a different machine. The internal drive becomes a Time Machine target and you boot off the external. This isn’t ideal long-term, but it’s the cheapest meaningful upgrade for older Macs.
Honest expectation-setting
A 2015 MacBook Air with 4GB RAM running Monterey is going to feel slow no matter what you do. The hardware is past the point where modern web apps are comfortable on it. You can clean it up so it’s usable for Mail, Pages, and basic browsing — but not so it feels new.
A 2017 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM running Monterey, after the cleanup steps above, can feel genuinely fast. The dividing line is mostly RAM and SSD speed, not CPU.
Run through the list, then check Activity Monitor again. Compare the memory pressure color before and after. If it’s green where it was yellow, you’ve made the Mac meaningfully better.