Make your Mac feel faster by reducing motion

Your Mac might be plenty fast, but every desktop switch, every Launchpad open, every full-screen transition adds a fraction of a second of animation you have to wait through. Turn on Reduce Motion and those transitions become instant fades — the interface stops making you wait for it. Flip it on under System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Reduce motion.

Turn it on and feel the difference

1. Open System Settings.
2. Click Accessibility, then Display.
3. Turn on Reduce motion.

Now switch to another desktop or open Mission Control. Where there used to be a sideways slide or a zoom you sat through, there's a near-instant fade. Nothing about the computer got faster — but the time between "I want that" and "it's here" shrank, and that's the part you actually feel. The setting behaves the same on macOS Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia.

Do it from Terminal instead

If you keep a setup script or you're tuning several Macs, the same switch has a defaults key. Apply it, then log out and back in so every process reads the new value.

# Make transitions instant
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceMotion -bool true

Changed your mind? Reverse it and log out again:

# Bring the animations back
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceMotion -bool false

Where the time savings actually land

The animations Reduce Motion collapses are the ones you hit dozens of times a day:

• Switching Spaces or full-screen apps — the biggest one, since power users bounce between desktops constantly.
• Opening Launchpad and Mission Control — no more zoom-in, zoom-out.
• Notification Center sliding in — it just appears.

Each is only a few hundred milliseconds, but multiplied across a day of app-switching they add up to a Mac that answers immediately. This is a perceived-speed win: it makes an already-quick Mac feel instant, and it stacks neatly with the other snappiness tweaks below.

Confirm it's actually on

The change is easy to verify: after enabling it, press Control+Up to open Mission Control, or swipe to another desktop. If the view fades in rather than zooming or sliding, it's working. One thing Reduce Motion doesn't touch is the Dock's own minimize effect — that Genie-versus-Scale animation is a separate setting, so if minimizing windows still feels slow, that's the next lever to pull. Reduce Motion is deliberately broad rather than granular: there's no per-animation slider, just the one switch that collapses the system-wide transitions. Pair it with a faster Dock and trimmed startup items and the whole machine answers as quickly as you can ask.

Stack it with the other speed wins

Reduce Motion is one lever; there are several more. See how to speed up a Mac for the full set of tweaks — from Dock timing to startup items — that make the machine feel quicker without new hardware.