Updating an older MacBook Pro

It's worth noting that a 2013 MacBook Pro is not slow--you're talking roughly 20-30% slower than the current top of the line and well faster than a current MacBook (the little one). I have a 2014 MacBook Pro as my primary daily-driver Mac and it's fine.

Don't download cleaners or whatever on OS X. (You shouldn't on Windows, either.) You almost certainly don't have malware (because while it exists for OS X it is mostly theoretical and I assume you have Gatekeeper enabled to restrict its possible entry). You do probably have installation cruft, leftovers not picked up by package installers, rando services installed as persistent daemons (if you've ever installed hardware drivers or VPNs or the like this is common, and most of them suck). But a cleaner utility won't catch that stuff.

The first thing I would do is take off the bottom plate of the laptop and clean the hell out of it. These things get dusty and that dust causes airflow problems, which causes the processor to throttle down. This isn't just a "blow some canned air into it" type of thing, though that'll help--your fans' bearings are probably also a shitshow too, and cleaning them as deeply as you can is important.

The second thing I would do is reinstall the OS. Back up your crap, go into Recovery, and reinstall the OS. Then be a little judicious in what applications you reinstall--as a rule of thumb, anything you get out of the App Store is basically fine, anything you side-install should be considered a little bit.

What OS are you on?

I literally just updated my MacBook Pro from 2013 from Mavericks to High Sierra in the last 24 hours. It wasn’t so much that it was “slow” that I got tired of some things working well but other things no longer being supported (ie, Dropbox). The reason I had held off so long is that my music software—ostensibly the reason I bought the computer in the first place—was doing well, but since I’ve started using it as my work computer the other stuff has mattered more. Safari was almost unusable. Chrome no longer could update, etc.

Good suggestions on the bottom panel tho.

If you’re willing to put a little money into it, consider adding a solid state drive. I removed the optical drive from my 2011 MacBook Pro and create a hybrid drive set up with the OS and applications on the SSD and data on the HD. It improved performance tremendously.

I bought a kit from OWC to do this that cost around $100 as I recall.

B H Kim said:

If you’re willing to put a little money into it, consider adding a solid state drive.

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@John Marzano Olympic Hero - is it a retina MBP? If not, you also really need to do this.

(My assumption is that a 2013 MBP is Retina, so it should already have an SSD on the board, but I could be wrong.)

John Marzano Olympic Hero said:

Thank you for all the tips, everyone.

I'm not trying to be dense, but I've never even considered taking the cover off. When you say "clean the hell out of it", what do you mean, exactly? Obviously, I'm not going to have water anywhere near this thing, but do you mean get a clean paper towel and just get all the dust out of it?

It is not a retina MBP. I'll start researching SSDs and how to install them. Thank you.

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Compressed air.

If it's a non-retina MBP of that vintage, I believe you can upgrade both the SSD and RAM. I am running a mid-2012 13" Pro unibody that still screams with 16 GB RAM and an SSD. IIRC, the boards can support 2x the amount of RAM Apple claims (so if Apple says 8 GB is the max, they can take 16 GB).

My guess is there are a host of YouTube videos on this. Example.