![]() I talk about a great many more in my new book “ Maintaining Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide,” which also covers a variety of other maintenance apps. And, because Mac OS X rebuilds caches automatically anyway, that space savings you achieve by deleting caches will soon disappear.Īnd I should also point out that no matter how thorough a maintenance app may be, no app, by itself, handles all the preventive maintenance tasks you should perform regularly to keep your Mac in top working order. All those gigabytes of cache files, for example, may seem worthless but are in fact helping numerous processes on your Mac to run more quickly and efficiently removing them may slow down your Mac rather than speed it up. Likewise, a lot of the ostensible “junk” that maintenance utilities remove is in fact useful (which is not to say essential). ![]() There are good reasons to delete things you don’t need even if you’re not short on disk space (such as preventing or resolving software incompatibilities,Īnd reducing the time and disk space required for backups), but if you already have plenty of free space and you’re looking only for a performance boost, deleting stuff may be a waste of your time. While it’s true that your Mac can slow way down and exhibit all sorts of misbehavior if you run out of disk space entirely (or come close to it), someone with 1 TB of free space is no better off, performance-wise, than someone with 100 GB of free space. I’ve found it to be a great way to find and eliminate stuff I don’t need on my Mac - especially on my MacBook Pro, whose too-small SSD is constantly on the verge of filling up.Ī Reality Check - Before I get into the specifics of what I like about CleanMyMac, I want to take issue with a marketing assumption that underlies nearly all Mac maintenance apps, including this one: that deleting files is a magical cure for your Mac’s problems. That’s how I mainly think of CleanMyMac 3, even though the developer, MacPaw, positions it as an all-purpose cleaning and maintenance app. And since most Mac developers (for reasons I can’t quite fathom) don’t provide their own, a third-party uninstaller utility is handy to have around. The uninstaller landscape has changed since then, but uninstallers are still as important as ever. I tested four of the most popular uninstaller apps available at that time, and found that although they all missed certain files, and some were easier to use than others, they seldom removed things they shouldn’t - and even when they did, it was rarely a serious problem. The two questions I was tasked with answering were “Are they safe?” and “Do they work?” Long story short, the answers were “Yes” and “Yes,“ with various qualifications (see “Mac utilities: Do uninstallers work?”). In 2010, Macworld asked me to write an article about uninstallers. Pretty soon, figuring out how to get rid of all that extra stuff when you wanted to stop using an app became a serious concern. An app might also add login or startup items, System Preferences panes, Dock icons, menu bar doohickies, and assorted background processes. Running an installer or opening an app for the first time might scatter files all over the place, particularly in various subfolders of /Library and ~/Library, such as Application Support, Caches, Frameworks, and LaunchAgents. As Mac OS X evolved, more and more apps needed to put more and more files in more and more places. Even for simple drag-to-install apps, there would nearly always be preference files, logs, and a few other items stored elsewhere. Of course, it wasn’t quite true that apps were self-contained. Done! Everything you needed was contained in the application package - a folder that looks and acts like a single file. To install them, you dragged them to your Applications folder, and to uninstall them, you dragged them from there to the Trash. In the early days of Mac OS X, Apple made a big deal about how most applications were, by design, self-contained. #1683: New M3 chips in updated MacBook Pros and iMac, record Apple Q4 profits on lower revenues, no more 27-inch iMacs.#1684: OS bug fix releases, Finder tag poll results, Messages identity verification, blocking spambots, which Apple services do you use?.#1685: Hidden secrets of the Fn key, Emergency SOS via satellite free access extended, RCS support in Messages, Rogue Amoeba icon evolution.#1686: Please support TidBITS, OS security updates, Apple services poll results, biking with an iPhone.#1687: Feature-rich OS updates, recovering from a crashing bug in Contacts, Zoom for Apple TV, how much do you use widgets?.
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