Speed Up a New M5 Mac (It Is Faster Than It Feels)

Here is the odd thing about a new M5 Mac: the hardware is so fast that the only thing slowing it down is macOS deliberately animating everything. Those animations are tuned for machines from years ago. Turn the unnecessary ones off and a new Mac stops feeling smooth and starts feeling instant. None of this touches performance settings — it just stops the software waiting on itself.

Reduce interface animations

The single biggest change. Windows that zoom open, Spaces that slide, the Dock that bounces — each adds a fraction of a second you feel all day.

# Speed up the window resize animation
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001
# Undo (Apple's default is 0.2)
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime
killall Finder

There is a Settings route too — System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Reduce motion — and the full breakdown is in disabling animations.

Make the Dock instant

If you auto-hide the Dock, macOS adds a delay before it slides back and then animates the slide. Remove both:

# No delay, no slide animation
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0
# Undo
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier
killall Dock

See the instant Dock and speeding up the Dock.

Faster typing and key repeat

The default key-repeat rate is slower than a fast typist wants. Bump it in System Settings → Keyboard, or see speeding up key repeat. Combined with reduced animation, the machine starts to feel like the hardware it is.

Mission Control and Spaces

If you use multiple desktops, the slide between them is one of the longest animations macOS runs. Reduce motion replaces it with a cross-fade, which is dramatically quicker on a machine this fast. One related setting worth changing while you are there: macOS reorders your Spaces based on recent use, which quietly breaks any muscle memory you build.

# Stop Spaces rearranging themselves
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool false
# Undo
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool true
killall Dock

What this does and does not do

Worth being precise, because “speed up your Mac” articles usually are not. Nothing on this page makes your M5 process anything faster. The CPU, the memory bandwidth, and the disk are untouched. What changes is latency you perceive — the gap between an action and its visible result. On an older Intel Mac those animations partly masked real slowness. On an M5 the work is already finished before the animation is, so the animation is the only thing you are waiting for. Removing it is the difference between a fast machine that feels smooth and a fast machine that feels immediate.

Two consequences: transitions become abrupt rather than fluid, which some people dislike and can undo in one command. And if your new Mac feels genuinely slow rather than merely animated — beachballs, fans, apps hanging — none of this is the fix. That is a different problem, and speeding up a Mac diagnoses it properly.

Undo everything at once

If you decide you preferred the animations, every change on this page reverses. The defaults delete form restores Apple’s original value rather than your guess at what it was, which matters because the stock timings are not round numbers:

# Put all of it back exactly as it shipped
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool true
killall Dock; killall Finder

And turn Reduce motion back off in System Settings → Accessibility → Display. Nothing here writes to a system file, requires a restart, or persists past those commands — which is the point. A setting you cannot confidently reverse is a setting you should think twice about applying in the first place.