I had a 2015 5K iMac that I recently upgraded to a Mac Studio. I upgraded more because I had some money made available and thought that this would be a good place to use it, not that my 2015 was dead slow. But I was using Big Sur, I never put Monterey on that, and I do not know how much of a difference that might have made.
My first question to you is, how much spare empty space do you have on your hard drive? I have a 1 TB drive on both my old and new computers and I try to keep it about 50% empty so there is lots of room for all applications to do what they need to do. That can be a big cause of slowdowns. If all of the mentioned applications are having issues, that gives me pause.
If you're needing to remove files from your hard drive, consider what I do:
I have a 4 TB drive that holds all of my images and many documents. I have a 2nd 4TB drive that I use to back up my first drive. I manually do this at least once a week or more often if I've done a lot of work. To do the backup of files, I use Chronosync. If you do not know about Chronosync, you should — it's the best backup software I'm aware of on the Mac.
I have a 3rd 4TB drive I use for Apple's Time Machine.
I also use a cloud service in case the house burns down. Am I paranoid? No, just a realist. In a worst-case scenario, I would not lose much, at worse, sometimes.
[Note: the 4TB is entirely based on what I need. Your needs may demand more or less hard drive space. Whatever you think you need, double it. Oh, the backup drives do not need to be SSDs or anything fancy or fast, just reliable. Do not use portable drives, as they are not as robust as desktop drives. And be aware that your first backup will take a long time. Also, look for backup software that can update your data as opposed to replacing your data.]
So, how much empty space is on your hard drive? I'm curious.
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