I started looking around for a cause and learned I have over 50 GB of Podcasts stored.      I  couldn't find exactly how to get  delete them so I called Apple.      Turned out I had inadvertently set podcasts to synk  cross all devices so each time I listened to one, it was downloading it and saving it over the years.

 

On one podcast I had over 863 saved episodes.

 

As it turned out, I actually had a total of just over 130 GB of stored podcasts which was too mutt.     I don't expect this old Air to last forever but it has been a  reliable workhorse.     

 

I have a new pro but I find  I keep  gravitating back to his old machine.       

 

Maybe you should check your storage data as well if you device is slow or getting that way.

Amazing machines, got an Mi Macbook Air, best laptop I ever had. The sound is very impressive

Love podcasts, much more interesting than film and tv and anyone can get on and give it a go. Some great podcasts around and some rubbish but once you find a great one, well worth it. 

My SIL has an iPad 3 that has a legacy program that she uses regularly, when I visited she complained that it had got unusably slow over time. It had less than 5% free space, after I deleted programs that were now available on later devices I got it to 50% free, it is now faster than it ever was.

 

So I agree that the take home is keep an eye on free space and delete untill there is at least 20% free specially on SSD based machines. Though for spinning mass storage a much smaller percentage works well

11 hours ago, sometimewoodworker said:

My SIL has an iPad 3 that has a legacy program that she uses regularly, when I visited she complained that it had got unusably slow over time. It had less than 5% free space, after I deleted programs that were now available on later devices I got it to 50% free, it is now faster than it ever was.

 

So I agree that the take home is keep an eye on free space and delete untill there is at least 20% free specially on SSD based machines. Though for spinning mass storage a much smaller percentage works well

 

Yes, indeed.   There was nothing nothing wrong with the Apple devices.     it was totally a user error which was  that I had set the podcast app to download across all devices ech time I listened to a podcast.      130 GB is a lot of podcasts

 

I suspect the same mistake could be made on a Windows machine just as easily.

 

I recently bought the Mac mini so that I would be able to use multiple computers at once. However, literally the following day my MacBook air got extremely slow for no reason, I didn't drop it or anything. There may have been an overnight update. Here is what I do (some tips mentioned here): 

 

1. Find and kill resource-consuming processes  
2. Check for macOS updates
3. Free up space on the startup disk
4. Limit the number of apps running in the background
5. Manage login items on startup

 

Hope it may help ~

4 hours ago, TerryGrey said:

I recently bought the Mac mini so that I would be able to use multiple computers at once. However, literally the following day my MacBook air got extremely slow for no reason, I didn't drop it or anything. There may have been an overnight update. Here is what I do (some tips mentioned here????

 

1. Find and kill resource-consuming processes  
2. Check for macOS updates
3. Free up space on the startup disk
4. Limit the number of apps running in the background
5. Manage login items on startup

 

Hope it may help ~

Also check

\private\var\vm for the number and size of the swap files, if you have more than 1, restart the Mac

It is not unknown for a process to spawn multiple gigs of swap slowing things to a geriatric snails pace