If you have the most powerful Mac Pro that can be made today, if you routinely go through the Apple Store clicking all the upgrade options, laughing like a crazy person, spending someone else's money, then we hate you -- and we want to come round your place to see it. However, invite us soon -- because even that Mac is going to slow down to a crawl, and you wouldn't like us when we giggle. The reason for that is because there are basic elements that determine whether any Mac is going to sing or sink, and these are all things that
CleanMyMac 3 is designed to fix. Specifically, it's there to fix them so that you don't have to: it helps stop you running out of space, it helps make sure your RAM isn't used up, and it keeps an eye on the health of key components.
The newly released CleanMyMac 3 is currently on sale for $39 (compared to a regular price of $79), and strictly speaking it doesn't do anything that you can't do yourself. For instance, it runs many utilities that are actually part of OS X and can be run directly (or at least more cheaply through other utility apps). You'd have a harder job working out some of the issues of memory usage and the state of your battery if you have one, but you could do it, especially if you have buy a cheaper utility like
iStat Menus, which is $16.
However, if you had iStat Menus, or if you used OS X's built-in utilities, then you wouldn't be facing that beach ball delay so often. What CleanMyMac 3 does is bring together a smorgasbord of tools that it then runs for you: click one button, and it goes off doing everything. No question: it is vastly more convenient and quick than doing dozens of different maintenance tasks yourself. It also saves you having to really understand what those tasks do. That's partly because it's so easy to run them, but also because CleanMyMac 3 deletes unneeded files off your Mac, and specifically works to avoid the one biggest worry of doing that. It won't remove anything you actually need.
That's the claim, and it seems borne out by the results we found. We ran CleanMyMac on a typical 3TB Mac -- in fact, one that has been running unusually slowly, so this was definitely a real-world test -- and it very quickly found that we could clear 15.38GB of files off it. That turns out to be the figure you could save by just clicking the one big Clean button, and it is not everything that it found; it's everything that it found which the program deemed safe to remove.
For instance, OS X comes with many language options, and if you only use English, you could ditch the rest without ever noticing. That's safe to do so that's in the big Clean button, though some programs -- notably Adobe products and Microsoft Office -- often react unpredictably to such "cleaning" of languages. We'd suggest a backup before allowing the language removal, though we had no trouble ourselves.
There is more that it finds, however, and it's stuff that you need to have a think about. We were a bit disappointed with only finding 15GB of reclaimable space, but CleanMyMac 3 then also showed us where we could save 90GB of what it calls "iTunes Junk," plus 600GB of of "Large & Old Files." You lose the convenience by not being able to delete all that with one button, but this is the material that you are most likely to wish you hadn't deleted, so this is a good thing.
Similarly, it doesn't count this in its Clean button count, but the CleanMyMac 3 also examines every application you have, and stands ready to remove any of them. It should be the case that you can uninstall any Mac app by dragging it to the Trash, but in practice it doesn't always work that simply anymore. It's still better than the mess of installing and removing software on Windows, but CleanMyMac 3 does a good job of spotting every file in every nook and cranny that needs to be cleaned out. Neatly, that doesn't just include the software in your Applications folder, it also spots AppleScripts in application libraries.
Over-full hard disks are typically a big smoking-gun culprit in many slowed Macs, but there are other maintenance issues with your storage. CleanMyMac 3 includes several universal maintenance utilities, such as reindexing Spotlight and Mail, plus every hard disk connected to your Mac gets its own optional disk utility. This is perhaps the most and the least useful part of the app, as this is what OS X does for you automatically if you leave your Mac on overnight.
All the work with finding reclaimable disk space would be a chore to do yourself, but this part should be being done for you anyway. So this isn't a reason to buy CleanMyMac 3, but having it there, you might as well use it.
Last, CleanMyMac 3 also installs a menu bar mini-app that keeps an eye on the general state of your Mac. It shows how full your RAM is, for instance, and does so in a clearer way than iStat Menus. There is some debate, however, on whether programs should interfere at all with how the Mac itself manages RAM: freeing inactive RAM might make a user feel psychologically better, but actually hurt performance, since OS X stores frequently-used instructions and other cached data in "inactive" RAM.
CleanMyMac 3 also pops up every time an application is taking too long to load, and offers to force quit it. While we were using the program to fix slowdowns, that was little use -- and now that things are better, we don't see it so much. So it doesn't feel like the handiest part of the app, and it is another one where you could force quit any app yourself.
There really isn't a thing in this app that you couldn't do yourself, and yet we still like it a lot. It's not the only tool we're using on this troubled Mac -- we're currently putting off reformatting the whole hard disk and starting again with a fresh download of OS X Yosemite. Yet until we buckle down to doing that, CleanMyMac 3 is sticking around.
CleanMyMac 3 requires OS X 10.8 or higher, and is
available on the official site for a launch price of $20. The regular price is $39.
Who is CleanMyMac 3 for:
The average Mac user is arguably more interested in the work they're trying to do than in keeping their machines running. After all, if you wanted to spend your days fiddling, you could've bought a Windows PC. If you're seeing that beach ball because your drive is getting full, and you're experienced enough to know that it will keep coming back but not experienced enough to dig under the hood yourself, you may want to get this.
Who is CleanMyMac 3 not for:
If you're familiar with OS X's Disk Utility and definitely if you spend much time up to your elbows in Terminal, then this will feel an unnecessary extravagance. Still, it's a lot handier than Terminal.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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