Tick the boxes marked Reduce motion and Reduce transparency, which will leave you with a faster, albeit plainer, interface.

To cut down on the extraneous eye candy, open up System Preferences from the Apple menu, then go to Accessibility and open up the Display tab. This trick is especially useful for those who tend to leave a lot of applications and windows open at one time. If you want to make sure your machine runs as lean and as mean as possible, you can turn these extra visual flourishes off. But all those fancy animations and transparency effects take up resources that could be going towards actual applications. There’s no doubt macOS is a gorgeous-looking operating system. Follow these steps to speed up your Mac machine like the experts do. (Not an Apple aficionado? Check out Popular Science’s guide to improving the performance of Windows machines.) These adjustments won’t be immediately obvious, but they can give macOS a new spring in its step. Luckily, a few tweaks under the hood can rev up the performance of your MacBook, iMac, or Mac Mini.

After a few years of use, even the best machines just don’t run as smoothly or quickly as they used to.