Who doesn’t want to squeeze the most speed and performance out of their computer? Mac users can optimize their devices in a number of ways, including:

Not all of these options will apply to every Mac, but even if you can't upgrade your Mac's RAM, there are steps you can take to improve overall performance without having to spend money on updates.

Of all the items mentioned above, the first thing you should do is make sure you have enough free space on your Mac's startup drive. If you can't achieve a reasonable amount of free space by deleting unnecessary or unwanted apps, documents, and data, you may want to consider moving your user folder to an external drive to free up space.

One common way to improve performance is to reduce the amount of superficial eye candy that macOS contains. One example is using animation to shrink an open window so that it fits in the Dock. This type of animation isn’t very resource-intensive compared to, say, applying a complex filter in Photoshop. But if your Mac is busy rendering new images in your favorite image-editing app while you’re working in your favorite database app, adding the resources necessary to animate a window could be enough to slow your Mac to a crawl.