We’ve all heard it – Macs “just work” and nothing ever goes wrong with them. While that can generally be somewhat true, certain things don’t get advertised. The Macs, while fancier than most regular PCs, can collect digital garbage in a way similar to every Windows-based PC out there – the more you use them, the more garbage that accumulates. So what if you lose a few gigs, you get so many, right? Not necessarily – Apple’s MacBook Air comes with a 64GB SSD – 60GB usable, about 15GB taken up by the operating system installation and suddenly the remaining 45GB of space are a whole lot more precious.

That’s where MacPaw’s CleanMyMac comes in & they have kindly provided us with a copy of their software to review. I have tried it on 2 different machines – my work Mac & the personal machine and the results, while positive, have varied. The work machine was just re-imaged so for all practical purposes I will just refer to it as the “new Mac” while my personal Mac has had a few years to accumulate useless files.

So they have a fantastic-looking website, but I am sure you are wondering if their software works as advertised and I am happy to share with you that it certainly does regardless of whether you have a brand new Mac or a somewhat aged one. On my new machine it cleared up over 2.5GB which may not seem all that exciting, but it got me excited to see how it would do on my older personal Mac & before I knew it, CleanMyMac had freed up 6.65GB of storage!

The software starts out by asking you what languages you care about so that it can strip out any content in languages that are not of any interest to you. It’s got an extensive Preferences screen allowing you to chose between cleaning:

  • User Cache
  • iOS Photo Cache
  • System Cache (Privileged – meaning it requires you to authorize it with your computer’s admin password so that it can access these files.)
  • User Logs
  • System Logs (Privileged)
  • Language Files
  • Universal Binaries
  • System Junk (that name made me smile)
  • Trashes & Leftovers

It’s important to note that CleanMyMac (despite its name) isn’t limited strictly to your Mac – it will also gladly clean both Windows and MacOS temporary system files that automatically get created on every USB jump drive or external hard drive you ever plug into your machine.

For those of you who love how stylish everything on your Mac is, CleanMyMac will fit right in since it ships with a few gorgeous color themes [Marble & Titanium].

For the privacy advocates – it offers a “Secure Erase” option that physically overwrites the files you remove so that way they’re not recoverable via some 3rd party software despite having been “deleted” previously.

All in all CleanMyMac is a fantastic piece of software – could you learn how to erase each thing it erases and do it yourself manually? Sure you could, but you’d have to determine if it’s worth your time & effort to do so when something in such a nice little package accomplishes the same. Could you spend the money on a jump drive to move some of your stuff? I suppose, but then you risk experiencing Murphy’s law in action -> instead of having cleaned up stuff you don’t care about from your machine, you’d have freed up space by moving things you DO care about on a USB jump drive which won’t be with you when you need it. Instead, you could have CleanMyMac wipe the junk and let you keep your important files on your machine.

In short CleanMyMac is a fantastic application that turns clean-up from a chore to a pleasure and crushes down 10+ steps into 2 -> Hit “Scan”, give it a bit of time to do its thing & hit “Clean” … Moments later you get to enjoy the newly discovered free space on your machine. Best of all you don’t even have to take my word for it, they’ve added a nice big “Tweet Results” button in their application to let people brag about all the space they’ve regained by using CleanMyMac and you can just read what people are saying for yourself by visiting this page and reading stuff from the “Live Twitter Feed”.