Posted on December 20, 2013 Written by Paul
Macs are powerful machines, as anybody who’s owned one will tell you. In fact, aside from the innovative design and the (occasionally) aggressive marketing strategies, therein lies the lure of the Mac: it’s resilient. It will withstand the test of time – if you don’t buy that, ask anyone whose Mac laptop survived for nearly a decade and then see if you can find anyone with a similar PC laptop experience. However, Macs are not infallible; they can slow down, have their processing power clogged, and ultimately prove difficult to clean up. Perhaps the biggest vulnerable spot of a Mac is the junk it tends to accumulate over the years, in hidden files, useless settings, and outdated caches. How can you avoid that? The answer is as simple as it is controversial. For a cleaner Mac use software, in order to avoid the hassle and the strain of digging up the junk yourself.
The caveats of a software-powered Mac clean up
Now, if you start reading Apple forum threads on Mac clean-ups, you’ll see that clean up software is a sensitive issue there. Users don’t explicitly discuss having used such software and the brand itself seems to frown upon third party programs that promise to offer you a lean, powerful machine by removing unnecessary items. What does this mean? Is it really risky to use such programs? If you do, do you risk destabilizing your Mac computer or causing some permanent damage by deleting important files? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that you’ll be hard-pressed to select a good program out of the ever-increasing list of software that promises a cleaner Mac. Use software at your own risk, Apple seems to be saying.
Want a cleaner Mac? Use software with good reviews
There are many Mac cleanup programs out there. A simple Google search will bring before your eyes Mackeeper, Detox My Mac, CCleaner for Mac, and many others. It’s difficult to figure out which one you want to use, since they all come with many features, which are different, but only to subtle degrees. Your quest is to understand what each program does and what you require, in order to make the best choice. We here at Lure of Mac recommend Clean My Mac 2, if for no other reason that we’ve reviewed it before and found it to be the best option in many respects. Check out some of the things we found it able to do, then decide for yourself if that’s what you need:
- Massive junk file cleanup. Most Macs manage to amass truly impressive amounts of junk files – on average, this comes to about 5GBs of file you could easily do without. You could, of course, try to remove all these files manually, but why would you do that, when you also have the option of taking care of it with the aid of a program, within minutes?
- Unearthing old useless files. Take the following test, if you will. Think about how many films you’ve watched off your Mac computer over the past month. A movie file alone has about 700MB in DVD format and up to 5GB at top Blu-Ray quality. If you store these movies on your hard drive, chances are you’re tallying up massive amounts of data which you’re not likely to ever use again. Clean My Mac 2 will find these files for you and submit a list of them to your review. You get to decide whether or not it’s worth keeping them.
- Removing iPhoto duplicates. How many of the pictures you take with your smartphone and sync via iPhoto are edited? Do you crop them, enhance them or rotate them? You probably do, yet you’re probably also unaware of the fact that all Macs store the original file on your HDD. Do you need those files? No, you probably don’t – so allow Clean My Mac 2 to do away with them for you.