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My MacBook is old and overheats a lot, and my iMac is new, has 4k resolution, a quad core CPU, but it's slow.

The main difference is that my new iMac has a 1TB HDD, and my old MacBook has a 128GB SSD.

Why is the older computer faster than the new one? What can I do to speed it up?

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    you already answered your own question: SSD make things faster than HD! – Alexandre Thebaldi Jun 26 '20 at 18:31
  • Welcome to Ask Different. This would be a great thing to ask someone you are sitting with and you can talk back and forth 20 questions to determine what precisely you consider fast. Can you review tour and How to Ask so that you can edit this with details that will help us help you? If you don’t know how to measure disk speed, that would make a great edit. I suspect the disk - how can I measure that? If you show a specific task to measure - we can help with faster for that task. – bmike♦ Jun 26 '20 at 18:37
  • Overheats? Are fans still clean or does dust obstruct the airflow? – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jun 26 '20 at 18:38
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Pretty much any SSD is going to be much faster than an HDD.

You're looking at much faster read speeds on an SSD.

A typical 7200 RPM HDD will deliver a read/write speed of 80-160MB/s. On the other hand, a typical SSD will deliver read/write speed of between 200 MB/s to 550 MB/s. Source

But, fret not! You can add an SSD to your iMac. Here's a link from the Apple's website. Here. I'm sure you can find a DIY guide there somewhere. Or check with your local Apple Authorized Service Provider.

But answering your question, if your 2014 has an SSD and your 2017 has a HDD, the one with the SSD is going to be faster, regardless of the year.

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