Why is my Mac slow?

What is the number one technological hurdle of computing? What problem plagues people more than anything else, despite massive leaps in hardware and software in the past twenty years?

“My computer is just so sloooooow.”

Ironic, really. Think about it – the one thing that vendors incessantly bombard us with is how fast their new product is. That alone is a clue, I suppose, that something is amiss – if someone is constantly yelling at you that the reason it’s better is because it’s faster, obviously being slow was a problem in the first place. And the more people are yelling about it, the bigger a problem it probably is.

The catch, though, the great reveal to this particular magic trick, is that the reason our computers never seem any faster is because they aren’t actually slow in the first place.

Nope, I’m not about to pull some zen mystical “it is what you want it to be,” although if you can pull that off, more power to you – go do that and stop reading this. For those of us who can’t do that (raises hand) we’ll be better suited by applying a staple of troubleshooting: if a problem hasn’t been solved by trying the same thing 500 times, perhaps we should try something else.

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