Slower Performance
After you installed Big Sur, it’s possible, and actually pretty common, that your Mac is running slower than usual. As we mentioned before, that’s because your Mac is optimizing itself and it should return to normal speed after a while.
However, if after a couple of days your Mac’s still running slower than usual you could try to restart it to see if that fixes the issue.
If that didn’t do the trick, there are other things you can do. First, you can disable some apps from running in the background, as we showed you before. Some apps are too demanding to be running in the background and that might cause your Mac to slow down.
You can also check for software updates. If there’s an issue with Big Sur that affects performance, Apple will most likely fix it as fast a possible. Having your Mac up to date can help with performance issues, as well as fixing other bugs and security issues you probably didn’t know about.
To check for software updates to go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Software Update. Your Mac will check for the latest update if there is any and ask you to update.
Finally, you can always go back to the Activity Monitor. It’ll let you know which apps are running and show you your CPU and Memory use so you can close the most demanding apps. Here’s how you can access the Activity Monitor:
- Go to your Spotlight Search. You can do this by pressing the Command Key and the Space Bar at the same time.
- Type Activity Monitor.
- Click on the CPU or Memory tabs to see your CPU load and Memory Pressure reports.
Finally, you can also try to give your Mac some First Aid by using Disk Utility. This can fix your performance issues and some other issues that you didn’t know your Mac had. Here’s how you can do it.
- Go to the Disk Utility app. You can access it by using the Spotlight Search on your Mac by pressing the Command Key and the Spacebar and typing Disk Utility.
- Click on View next to Disk Utility and make sure Show all Devices is selected if available.
- On the left sidebar, you should see all your Volumes, Containers, and Disks.
- Select your Volumes, they should be the ones at the bottom and then click on First Aid at the top of the window.
- After you’re done with your Volumes, use First Aid with your Containers and then your Disks.
Apple recommends you fix them in that order so you know exactly where the problem was. It’s recommended that you start using First Aid from the bottom and work your way up.