1. Tone down the visual effects

Mac OS has many visual effects that take precious CPU cycles when daily using it. You can turn them off to make system feel snappier and give more CPU/GPU headroom for other apps.

Open up System Preferences from the Apple menu, then go to Accessibility and open up the Display tab. Tick the boxes marked Reduce motion and Reduce transparency.

2. Macs Fan Control

From factory Macbooks are set up to be as quiet as possible. This limits their performance because fans will wait long time to spin up. I recommend to sensor based on CPU-PECI with minimum temp speed of 45C and maximum temp speed 85C.

3. Turn off weaker GPU

When You have two graphics cards in Energy Saver options You can turn off weaker one by unchecking “Automatic Graphics Switching”

4. Regular maintenance

To keep Macbook in top shape You need to do some regular maintenance.

  • Each month You should:
    • dust off inside case, which will help keep temps cooler and fans quiteter
    • check Your Disk space and doing some cleanups. SSDs are faster with less data they have on them.
    • make sure all one-time installed software is removed
    • You have all necessary updates installed
  • Each year You should:
    • change thermal paste on CPU and GPU

5. (Advanced) Volta

There are apps that let You manage advanced power settings in MacBook. Volta App let’s You set power limits and processor voltage levels. With proper testing You could achive much better performance with very specialized tuning that suits Your workflow.

That's it for this post, thanks for reading!