Why is my refurbished Macbook Pro slow?

to fix corrupt filesystem, try restarting in Safe mode (hold shift at startup). Safe mode loads the kernel, then does a five-minute repair disk pass as it starts up. Then Safe mode loads the smallest possible set of Apple-only extensions, not including graphics acceleration. Screen re-draw will be wonky and slow, but should ultimately be correct. if the issues abate in Safe mode, "it's something you added".

On next startup, regular mode will rebuild some system caches, so it will take slightly longer to start up.

I recently bought a refurbished Macbook Pro.

Did you purchase this notebook directly from Apple or another third-party source?

Regardless, to help troubleshoot your Mac, I would suggest that you consider using EtreCheck and posting the resultant report for us to review. (Note: The EtreCheck report does NOT contain any personal information.)

• You can download EtreCheck fromhere.
• Start EtreCheck from a normal user account. Optionally, you can run it from a user account with Administrator privileges.
• Select a problem from the drop-down menu to enable the "Start EtreCheck" button. Optionally, you can add comments on what issues your Mac is experiencing, especially to aide others with similar Mac issues.
• Click on Start EtreCheck
• Allow the program to run to completion.
• When done, select Report from the left-side window to display it.
• Select the "Share Report" icon.

  Select Copy Report

• Paste the report to your reply post.

First off, welcome to the Mac world! Don't let lack of familiarity stop you from learning about using your new notebook to its fullest. There are tons of getting started material out there to help with this. I would strongly recommend those from either Apple or Take Control books to get you "up to speed" quickly. If you used Windows or Linux, learning macOS is not that much different.

Time Machine is Apple's built-in incremental backup app. When paired with either an external drive, Time Capsule (an Apple wireless router with a built-in drive), or a number of other devices, your notebook can make timely backups in the background. These will really come in handy if you accidentally erase important files or the eventual disk crash to restore your data.

What you added shouldn't be a problem; however at least, Spotify and the Apple Photos apps have caused your notebook to either hang or crash.

At this point, I would suggest that you create a new user account on your notebook. Log out of your current one, and then, log back in with the new account. Don't add any software. Use the notebook for at least a day. Is it still running slowly? If so, it may be possible that you have a defective device and I would suggest that you contact Apple to see what your options are going forward. If, on the other hand, your Mac is now performing "normally," the issue is with your other user account.

It’s not the SSD that’s the device causing the excessive heat. Most likely it would be the CPU and GPU processors being the culprit. That’s because of all the processing needed for watching those movies.

The report identified one major issue: Time machine backup not found. There were three minor issues: corrupt file system, abnormal shutdown, and limited drive access.

Ok, let's take a look at each of these:

1. Time Machine backup not found - This would be "normal" if you're currently now using Time Machine with your notebook and can be safely ignored if that's the case. Although you should consider using TM going forward for making backups.
2. Abnormal shutdown - This can be caused for a number of reasons. It indicates that your notebook did not go through a normal shutdown and potentially if this continues to happen you risk losing data.
3. Corrupt filesystem - This is not normal and indicates that there may something amiss with one or more of the operating system's critical files or something amiss with the storage drive where these files reside. This would have to be further investigated.
4. Limited drive access - With the latest release of macOS Mojave the additional security is preventing apps, like EtreCheck, from accessing the system drive. In this case, the report will not be complete as it can be. You can elect to add EtreCheck to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy to allow this ... or not.

I'm assuming that after you got your notebook, you restored your user data from a backup using something like Migration Assistant. Is that correct? If so, it may be possible that backup may be corrupted and caused the restoring of "bad" files to the new device ... and if this is the case, is this when you started to notice the performance issues?

Just wanted to add that since you bought it from Apple, you have a one year warranty which includes 90 days of complimentary phone support, so, you can contact Apple at any time if you wish. You also have 14 days from the date of purchase to return it for a full refund, no questions asked.

And, Chrome is known to be a huge resource hog; personally, I won't have it on any of my Macs.