Speed up Mac login by not reopening old apps

If your Mac reaches the desktop and then spends a full minute wheezing — apps bouncing in the Dock, windows painting one after another, the fans spinning up — the login itself may not be slow. What's slow is everything macOS is reopening at once. Turn off window restoration and login stops racing to rebuild yesterday's session, so you get a responsive desktop far sooner.

Why reopening drags login down

When you log in, macOS doesn't just show a desktop — it relaunches the apps that were running and asks each one to restore its windows. On a busy Mac that means half a dozen apps unpacking dozens of documents, browser tabs, and project windows in the same few seconds, all competing for CPU and disk. Even fast Macs feel gummy through that burst. The reopening is the load. Skip it and login has almost nothing to do, so the machine is usable the moment you're on.

Stop the window-by-window restore

The setting that governs this is a single checkbox, worded as its opposite. Turning it on tells apps to close their windows on quit — which means nothing to rebuild at login:

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Scroll to the Windows section.
3. Turn on Close windows when quitting an application.

Apps now launch to a light, empty state instead of re-inflating your last session. Same control on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. From the command line it's one line — handy in a setup script:

# Apps launch empty, so login has no windows to rebuild
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

# Undo — restore windows at launch again
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool true

The change applies to apps quit after you set it, so the first clean login is your next one. Nothing to restart.

Two more places login time hides

Restoration is usually the biggest culprit, but a genuinely fast login has two other levers:

• The restart checkbox. When you shut down or restart, uncheck Reopen windows when logging back in so that boot doesn't fire everything up either.
• Login items. Apps set to open at login run no matter what you do about windows, and a stack of them is often the real weight. Prune the list under System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions and keep only what you truly need on every day.

Between fewer apps launching and none of them rebuilding old windows, login goes from a warm-up lap to an instant start.

Is it login or is it boot?

Worth separating two things people lump together. If the delay is before the login screen — Apple logo, progress bar — that's boot, and window restoration won't touch it. If the delay is after you type your password, while the desktop is visible but stuttering, that's the reopening this guide fixes. Knowing which one you're fighting saves you chasing the wrong setting.

Chase the rest of the slowness

Reopening is one drag on a tired Mac, not the only one. Work through the bigger picture with our guide to speeding up your Mac for storage, memory, and startup wins beyond window restoration.