Daniel bought his MacBook Air two years ago and it was noticeably quick out of the box. Startup took about twelve seconds. Now it takes closer to fifty. He has not added dramatically more apps, but over those two years each new app he installed asked — sometimes very politely, sometimes just by default — whether it could start automatically with his Mac. He said yes, or he clicked past the prompt without reading it, many times. The cumulative effect became the fifty-second boot he now accepts as normal. It does not have to be.
What are login items?
Login items (also called startup items or launch agents depending on their technical type) are programs or background processes that macOS is instructed to start automatically as soon as you log into your account. Some of them open as visible windows. Others run invisibly in the background.
Some login items are clearly useful. A cloud sync service needs to start early to keep your files current. A backup utility should be running before you open anything important. A messaging app that you use throughout the day makes sense to have ready when your Mac wakes up.
Many others, however, are there simply because the app added itself during installation and you never revisited the setting. Updater processes for applications you rarely open, companion utilities for hardware you no longer use, helper tools for services you cancelled years ago — these all contribute to a longer startup sequence and persistent background memory usage throughout your session.
Where to find and manage them
Apple consolidated login item management in macOS Ventura (version 13) and later. The relevant screen is now in System Settings, under General, and then Login Items & Extensions. On older macOS versions (Monterey and earlier), the same list lived in System Preferences under Users & Groups, in the Login Items tab.
When you open this screen, you’ll see two sections. The first, labeled Open at Login, contains apps and services that will launch as visible applications when you log in. The second, Allow in Background, covers the less visible items — helper processes, menu bar utilities, and background agents that apps have registered to run automatically.
Reading the list
Take a moment to read through both sections carefully. For each item, ask yourself: do I actually want this running every time I start my Mac? For some items the answer is immediately obvious. For others, the name may not be intuitive — many background agents are listed under technical-sounding names that do not obviously connect to the app that installed them.
If you encounter an item you do not recognize, a quick web search for its name will usually clarify what it belongs to. Most background login items are harmless, but knowing what each one is helps you make an informed decision about whether it needs to start automatically.
What is safe to remove from the login list
Generally speaking, it is safe to remove an item from the login list if any of the following is true: the app it belongs to is something you open manually when you need it, you no longer use the app at all, the item is an updater for an app that you are comfortable updating manually, or the item is a helper for hardware (like a printer or external drive) that is not always connected.
Removing an item from the login list does not uninstall the app. It simply stops it from starting automatically. You can still open the app manually whenever you want it, and if the app needs the background process, it will typically restart it when you open the app itself.
Some items in the background section are placed there by macOS itself and are required for normal system operation. These are generally listed under names like com.apple.something and are not items you should remove. The items worth reviewing are those associated with third-party apps you installed.
Launch agents in the Library folder
Beyond the items visible in System Settings, some apps install additional startup items at a lower level — in the LaunchAgents folder within your personal Library folder. These are not always listed in the System Settings panel, particularly on older macOS versions.
To find them, open Finder and use the Go menu while holding the Option key to access the hidden Library folder. Inside, you’ll find a folder called LaunchAgents. The files here have names that usually indicate which app they belong to — typically in a format like com.developername.appname.plist. Files from apps you have fully uninstalled and do not plan to use again can be moved to the Trash.
Be conservative here. If you are not sure what a file is for, leave it in place. The potential performance improvement from removing one unrecognized file is minimal, and removing something macOS or an active app depends on can cause unexpected behavior.
The effect on startup time and memory
The practical impact of trimming your login items depends on how many items were running and how resource-intensive each one was. For a machine with a long list of startup items accumulated over years, the improvement in boot time can be meaningful — sometimes halving or better the time from login screen to a fully responsive desktop.
The memory benefit is often more consistent. Each background process, even a small one, occupies some RAM. A handful of them together can occupy several hundred megabytes — memory that would otherwise be available for the apps you actually have open. On a Mac with 8 GB of RAM (still common in older models), this headroom makes a real difference to everyday responsiveness.
What happened with Daniel
When Daniel finally opened the Login Items screen, he found 19 items. Of those, he could confidently identify 7 as things he wanted. The others were updaters, utilities for apps he had deleted, a cloud service he had stopped subscribing to, and three items he could not identify at all (a web search revealed two were safe to remove and one was a system component worth keeping). After the review, his Mac started in about 18 seconds. The difference was immediate and, he noted, a little embarrassing to have tolerated for so long.