Macs are loved for their reliability and polish. But, like all computers, even Macs tend to slow down with age. When that happens, many people choose the nuclear option: a complete system reinstall. There are cases when a full reinstall is really the best course of action, but using the best Mac cleaner apps is much faster and often just as effective.
- Cleaner is a cleanup app that offers Memory Optimization, Disk Cleaning and System Monitoring to keep your Mac optimized for its performance. Cleaner is designed to clean unnecessary files on a Mac with only a few clicks.
- Memory Clean is a small tool assisting in cleaning the Mac RAM memory and showcasing how much you have to access. It stays in your menu bar and allows you to view the memory statistics. All the features offered by the tool are accessible easily without any sort of trouble due to its smooth interface.
- The app guarantees a full-time worry-not working environment on your Mac with support for Yosemite, El Capitan and Sierra. Why MacFly Pro is the Best App to Clean Mac? Unlike most of other apps, this one comes along with four different cleanup stages that will make your mac as good as new.
- App Cleaner is a tool to delete apps on Mac without leaving any leftovers. The program finds applications’ service and temporary files and the remains of already removed apps, allowing you to change and disable login items, manage Mac extensions, clean up and uninstall Mac apps.
Testing most Mac OS X cleaners available, we’ve selected our top 4 favorite free and paid cleaners for your Mac.
As a recently converted mac user I am interested to see if there is a Mac equivalent to pc's 'disk cleanup' and a defragger. I know mac's are far more robust than pc's but they surely need a clean every so often.
Top 4 Best Mac Cleaner Apps in 2019
A great Mac cleaner must support the latest version of Mac OS X, it must be easy to use, and it must deliver on its promises. As much as we like free Mac cleaner apps, we’re not excluding paid cleaners from this list. Often, paid cleaners come with the best features and the most reliable support. Paying a relatively small amount of money for a Mac cleaner makes a lot of sense if it can extend the life of your Mac computer for another year or two.
1. CleanMyMac X
The developers of CleanMyMac know how Macs work; they also know how to clean up a Mac with a click of a button. CleanMyMac monitors the activity of many common Mac apps as well as the operating system itself to remove junk from every inch of your Mac. The Mac cleaner has been in active development for several years now, and its large database of rules, items, and exceptions reflects this. With CleanMyMac, there’s no reason to worry about accidentally removing an important file or corrupting the operating system, making it unusable.
CleanMyMac features a fantastic one-button cleaning system, which automatically decides which parts of your Mac need to be optimized and which are fine as they are. You can, of course, manually control the cleanup process if you’d rather be behind the steering wheel.
Besides cleaning, CleanMyMac also comes with handy maintenance and monitoring features. It helps you uninstall apps without leaving any residue files behind, it gathers all your extensions, widgets, and plugins into one simple control panel, securely shreds sensitive files to pieces, and more. You can try CleanMyMac for free, a single Pro license costs $39.95.
2. Disk Drill
Disk Drill is the most popular and user-friendly data recovery tool for Mac, and it also comes with some useful disk cleaning features. Disk Drill can analyze your storage space and locate unused, large, and duplicate files to free up your storage effortlessly. It can also monitor the health of your storage device and provide you with timely alerts in case it detects early signs of malfunction.
Considering how comprehensive the cleanup features of Disk Drill are, it’s surprising that the software focuses, first and foremost, on data recovery. Indeed, Disk Drill can recover over 300 file formats from all common storage devices with a single click of the Recover button.
If there’s one data recovery tool that can convince anyone that data recovery isn’t as scary as it often seems, it’s Disk Drill. After you launch it, you will see a list of available storage devices. Select the one you want to recover files from and click on the Recover button. Wait for Disk Drill to present you with a list of deleted files and choose which files you’d like to recover.
Top 10 war games for mac. You can download Disk Drill for free to see what it can do for you. When you’re ready, you can purchase the Pro version along with lifetime upgrades for a very attractive price. All disk clean-up and duplicate finder features within Disk Drill are free.
Download Disk Drill data recovery app for Windowsfor Mac
3. Onyx
Onyx is a versatile Mac OS X maintenance and cleanup utility that can verify the structure of the file system on the startup volume, repair disk permissions, configure certain parameters hidden from the system and from certain apps, empty system, user, Internet, and font caches, forcefully empty the trash, rebuild Launch Services, CoreDuet database, Spotlight and Mail indexes, and more. These features make it one of the best free Mac cleaner apps.
Onyx was created in 2003 by Joël Barrière, who is known on the Internet as Titanium. In the early days, Onyx was intended chiefly for Barrière’s personal use, but it was also available for free for everyone who wanted to try it out. Soon, users started requesting features, and Barrière started taking users’ suggestions and requests into consideration, regularly releasing new updates and bug fixes.
Onyx is available in several different versions, each compatible with a specific version of the Mac OS X operating system. The software only works correctly when it’s installed on the supported version of Mac OS X. Best pocket hd video camera. As a free Mac cleaner, Onyx accomplishes a lot without asking for anything in return. We recommend it not just as a Mac cleaner but also as a general maintenance tool.
4. AppCleaner
It’s up to each app developer to make the uninstall process as clean and thorough as possible. Unfortunately, not all app developers can, or are willing to, ensure that their apps don’t leave any reside files behind.
Luckily, there are apps such as AppCleaner, which solves the issue elegantly and for free. AppCleaner is a small utility with only a single screen, where you can drop installed apps. Anytime you drop an app onto the AppCleaner, the utility automatically finds all files associated with the app you want to delete and removes them.
It’s important to remember to use AppCleaner every time you want to delete an app from your Mac. Doing so will greatly reduce the number of junk files on your computer, helping it work as new for a long time.
What Is Mac Cleaner and How It Works
A Mac cleaner is an app designed to speed up your Mac computer, making it as fast as brand new. To understand how Mac cleaners work, you need to understand why Macs become slower with age:
Lack of Free Storage Space
Perhaps the most common cause of Mac slowdowns is the lack of free storage space. It’s, unfortunately, no secret that Apple charges a premium for large storage devices. Base models are usually offered with much less storage space than comparable Windows or Android devices. The Mac OS X operating system alone takes around 10 GB of space, and large apps and games such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, World of Warships, or War Thunder make the number skyrocket.
Without any free storage space, Macs have nowhere to store temporary files, which can cause the entire operating system as well as all apps to come to a crawl.
Mac cleaners address this problem by deleting the leftover system and app files. They also help users identify large files and folders and either delete them or move them elsewhere.
Stale Caches and Temporary Files
The Mac OS X operating system stores a lot of information locally to improve loading times and make websites and apps more responsive. Sometimes, the locally stored data become outdated, potentially causing all sorts of issues. This most commonly happens when browsing the Web.
Most Mac cleaners allow you to quickly and easily empty stale caches and delete old temporary files, which causes websites and apps to send you the latest copies of data. You could, for the most part, achieve the same results even without a Mac cleaner, but it would take you a long time to accomplish what Mac cleaners do with a press of a button.
Most Mac cleaners allow you to quickly and easily empty stale caches and delete old temporary files, which causes websites and apps to send you the latest copies of data. You could, for the most part, achieve the same results even without a Mac cleaner, but it would take you a long time to accomplish what Mac cleaners do with a press of a button.
Startup Background Processes
Every time you boot up your Mac computer, multiple critical, as well as non-essential system processes, load in the background. The problem is that some apps are designed to behave in the same way — even if there’s no good reason for them to start automatically in the background! What’s more, these apps continue to run in the background until you manually close them, eating up your precious hardware resources.
If you want a clean Mac, make sure to identify all processes that automatically start in the background and only keep those you really need. A good Mac cleaner can identify startup processes with a significant negative impact on the boot time and disable them.
.updated: September 4, 2019 author:
Spring comes with its own rituals. Here at Macworld, we like to throw open the windows, beat the dust out of the rugs, and straighten up our Mac desktops. Don’t stop at cleaning your home this season. Clean up your Mac.
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If you're using macOS Sierra, it has a feature that will help tremendously with your Spring cleaning: Optimize Storage. You can use Optimize Storage to activate the Store in iCloud option, remove iTunes videos you've watched (they can be re-downloaded), set it to empty the Trash automatically, reduce clutter caused by large files and downloads, and a lot more. Optimize Storage is especially handy if you're using a Mac laptop with flash storage. You usually don't get the same amount of space as you would with a hard drive, so managing your space becomes more important.
Learn more about Optimized Storage in macOS Sierra
Best App For Cleaning Up Macbook Pro
Beside Optimize Storage, there are other way to keep your Mac digitally clean. These tips from our editors will help you keep your Mac fresh and organized, whether you're using macOS Sierra or an older version of OS X.
Tidy up your desktop
Best App For Cleaning Laptop
Light Pillar’s wonderful app Desktop Tidy ($8; available on the App Store; requires OS X 10.8 or later) is a handy utility that cleans up your Mac’s desktop, keeping it free of clutter. It stores all desktop files and folders in a hidden Shadow Desktop, which you can access from the menu bar or in the Finder. That way, every file I download, each screenshot I capture, and every image I drag and drop to my desktop is stored and filed in an easy-to-reach location.
The utility quietly works its magic at scheduled intervals—as often as every minute or as infrequently as every seven days. It even organizes desktop items by file type, which makes finding and renaming files easy.—Leah Yamshon
Read our full review of Desktop Tidy ()
Delete unnecessary disk images
For most people, the Downloads folder is a dumping ground where files pile up in forgotten heaps. Go to the Downloads folder in the Finder and type
disk image
into the search box. Select Disk Image under the Kinds header. Now, delete all of those downloaded DMG files that are just taking up space!—Jason SnellIn macOS Sierra, there's another way to delete disk images. Go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac, then select Storage and click on the Manage button. In the Reduce Clutter section, click on the Review Files button. In the main window, click on Downloads and the click on the Kind header to sort by that particular type. To delete a disk image. click on it, and then click on the X button that appears.
Empty out space-hogging Mail Downloads
I get quite a few attachments via email—PDFs, ePub ebooks, Word documents, images, you name it. Most of the time I save those files to my desktop or my Downloads folder, but on occasion I make the mistake of double-clicking a file. When you do that, the document saves itself to your Mail Downloads folder, hidden away in your Library file. Double-click enough files, and that folder can balloon in size. That’s why I make sure to check it and empty it every year or so.
Best Free App For Cleaning Mac
The easiest way I find to do this is to use Spotlight—press Command-Space to see a search field appear—and then type
Mail Downloads.
In the Folders section, you should see the Mail Downloads Data folder.If this isn’t working for you, try getting to it the long way. In the Finder, select Go > Go to Folder. Type
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads
in the text field. Click Go, and a Finder window will open showing the Mail Downloads folder.Once you get to the folder, you can select all files and delete, or rescue the few files you want to keep awhile in a more permanent location—say, the regular old Downloads folder.—Serenity Caldwell
Keep a clean cache
We’ve all heard “Empty your cache” as a web browser troubleshooting tip. As it turns out, a Mac stores a lot of information—not just browser-related details—in files called caches, allowing quick access to that data and reducing the need to fetch it from the original source again. Unfortunately, that information can sometimes become corrupted, or otherwise problematic. For example, you might end up looking at old data instead of the most current version of a website, or you may notice that a file’s icon doesn’t look quite right in the Finder.
Although you can manually go in and find some of OS X’s most commonly used cache directories (
~/Library/Caches
is a good place to start), plenty of tools will handle this job for you. Cocktail, from Maintain, is among the longest-running and best of these. Not only can it clear your caches, but it can also perform assorted other maintenance tasks, such as deleting your browser’s cookies, looking for corrupted preference files, rebuilding certain databases, and way more. You can download it and use it for free for up to ten launches, but at $19, it’s a pretty good buy.—Dan MorenPurge unwanted apps
As someone who reviews products for Macworld, I regularly try new apps and then delete them. For the most part, you can drag an app from the Applications folder to the Trash, but often an app creates folders and files outside of the app package and in various locations on the drive, which makes those files and folders difficult to find and toss out. For this reason, I use AppTrap, a free utility that installs as a System Preference pane and runs in the background.
When you Trash an app, AppTrap finds all the associated files and folders and moves them to the Trash—there’s no need for you to find those files on your hard drive yourself. Sometimes, however, when your Mac is updating an app, you want to keep the associated files but discard the old app; AppTrap will ask if you want to leave the files (which you want to do) or move them to the Trash. You can find other, just-as-capable utilities that do the same thing, but I’ve used AppTrap for years, and it has never given me problems or affected my Mac’s performance.
In macOS Sierra, you can also remove apps through the Optimize Storage feature. In the Apple menu, select About This Mac. Select Storage and click on the Manage button. In the left section, select Applications. The main section of the window will show a list of your applications. Select the app you want to remove, and then click on the X button to remove it. One caveat with this method: Only apps downloaded from the App Store will have all its components removed. If you got an app outside of the App Store and use this method to uninstall it, all the components may not be removed. Under the Kind header, you can see if an app was from the App Store or not.—Roman Loyola
Disinfect your grubby keyboard
My ergonomic keyboard accumulates so much dust and crumbs that occasionally I have to turn it upside down and shake it just to get the keys to work. But a thorough cleaning, even just once a year, can knock away the grime and germs. Unplug your keyboard or, if it is wireless, remove its batteries. If you’re cleaning a laptop, shut it down and unplug it. Blow the dust out from between the keys with a can of compressed air.
To finish the job, all you need is a package of disinfecting wipes. Apple recommends Lysol Wipes or Clorox Kitchen Disinfecting wipes by brand name. The basic idea, however, is to wipe your keys gently with something alcohol-based. (Before you use a wipe, squeeze out any excess liquid.) As tempting as it might be when you’re feeling germophobic, do not use wipes with bleach, or spray everything with Lysol; you might damage the keyboard.—Scholle Sawyer McFarland
Editor’s note: This article originally posted on March 21, 2013. It has been updated to reflect macOS Sierra.
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