Does a newer Mac always give faster speed?

If you're coming from a platter drive to an M1 or M2 Mac, it should definitely be faster, both in terms of the CPU and SSD. I recommend going for an M2 if you can help it, as it will last longer and be faster.

I'll never go to anything else. I've hard they're wicked fast on Windows as well.

Once you go SSD, you'll never go back! I'm running an NVMe drive and Windows 11 and it's crazy fast! I'm pretty sure the new Macs use NVMe as well, so it'll definitely be faster. Assuming Ventura fixes a ton of issues including that ridiculous mouse issue, and Apple Accessibility tells me I can set up a new machine that ships with Ventura or later without the need for a mouse, I'll consider jumping back into the Mac ecosystem. I've had some time to calm down since discovering that, and if Apple is truly committed to providing blind customers with accurate information and the high quality VoiceOver experience I know is possible, I'm happy to use a system I find superior.

A 2017 Mac should be fast enough. Maybe you need to reinstall macOS to restore speed gain.

Cleanmymac could help with speed and performance as well.

First, the original 2 Mac M2 chip laptops that came out in June are virtually identical in speed, despite one being called a Macbook Pro.

Second, I have a brand new Mac Studio M1 ultra, which is the fastest, most powerful computer sold by Apple right now. I bought it because I was unhappy with the performance of my 2017 iMac Pro. I migrated everything from my old computer to my new computer and was very unhappy to discover that I had also migrated whatever was causing the slowness. Since then, I have been doing a lot of research, experimenting, and spending a lot of time with tech support on the phone, trying to figure out what is causing the slowness.

Now, I am just about ready to reformat my HD and start completely from scratch, as if I was a brand new computer user. I need the speed of a Mac Studio ultra for sound studio work. I can use my old 2016 Macbook Pro for everything else if need be. It really is a shame, though, that Apple can't figure out what's causing the slowdowns, such as safari not responding.

Remember DOS? Remember how lightening fast it was? I often wonder what makes us think we've been making progress.

It depends on which Mac systems you compare. If it's a similar model in the range, then newer devices should give better performance. Reviews are available online that should give you an impression of the performance of whichever machine you're contemplating.

I'm impressed by the performance of my 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro processor.

If you've got a 2017 iMac, Apple was still including HDDs in the base model. If you upgrade from that to an M1 or M2, you'll definitely notice a speed bump. I've heard the APFS file system runs like absolute garbage on HDDs, so that might explain the performance hit. Like I said, once you go to an SSD, you'll never want to go back. If your Mac has an SSD, there's probably something wrong with the OS and it might be time to do a clean install or spend potentially days or weeks trying to track down some weird issue. Of course, it would be worth it to make the jump to Apple Silicon. The days of running macOS on Intel are numbered and if we know anything about Apple, it's that they won't hesitate to leave legacy technologies behind.