Here’s why your Mac is slow or isn’t starting

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Summary

I often get asked why a Mac runs slow or won’t start, and a big reason is not enough hard drive space. Apple pushes iCloud as a solution, but iCloud syncs files locally and can still fill up your drive. When you buy a new Mac, get as much SSD space as possible because you can’t upgrade it later.

Raw

Sometimes I get asked for my clients why their computer is running slow or sometimes just doesn’t start at all. Now, there are a million one reasons why that would happen. But one of the reasons I want to touch on today is that if you don’t have enough space on your hard drive or SSD, nowadays it’s SSDs, but I’m just going to use the word hard drive.

If you don’t have enough space on your hard drive, then the operating system can’t function. It doesn’t have space to move around. And sometimes it will make it run slow, and sometimes it will just will not start at all. In fact, it will sometimes start up and then shut down the computer. Now, the shutdown on a computer could be a hardware issue, but more often than not, it’s a space issue.

The problem I have with this is that when you go and buy a new computer from Apple, they don’t often tell you the amount of space you need. They don’t really talk about it. What they say is, well, you can, if you don’t want to buy a more expensive machine, you can buy a less expensive machine, i.e. less space, but use iCloud.

Now, it sounds fantastic. Yes, I’ll put everything on the iCloud. What they don’t tell you, however, is that iCloud isn’t like a drop box type thing where you can put it there and then get the files so they’re not on your computer. What iCloud does, it syncs your iCloud information. And it’s all automatic. There’s no, I don’t want this file. It kind of automatically thinks you’re using these files, so I’ll have them locally as well. So effectively, it’s kind of a sync rather than a space, like an external hard drive, as it were.

So if you have lots of stuff, sorry, data on your iCloud, it’s effectively synced to your Mac. So if you have more space on your iCloud or more data on your I cloud, then your Mac can handle, then what happens, it fills up your Mac and then your computer runs slow and so on.

Now, again, bear in mind that there’s an automatic thing. If the computer thinks that there’s not enough space, it will leave some space for it to function. But in my experience, that isn’t always the case. I’m just telling you because what’s written on paper doesn’t necessarily mean what happens in the real world. And in the real world, and I’ve seen this hundreds of times, is that it constantly uses up the space. It tries to do it. Yeah, the technology is there, but it, again, real world, it doesn’t always work.

So when you buy a new Mac, get as much RAM, I’ll talk about that another time, and enough space, hard drive space, SSD space as possible because you can’t upgrade these things anymore.

Anyway, hopefully that helps. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. There should be comments down below by now. And there’ll be a link up here to get in touch with me. Have a great day. See you next one. Ciao.