You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

MacPaw CleanMyMac X

I've been really tempted to buy CleanMyMac X for a while now. The app seems to work nicely and I've heard it can really improve the speed of the system. Plus it's made by the people who own the Unarchiver, so it seems like they'd offer good apps. However, many people have said that OnyX is the only thing you need, and others have said that OS X has does cleaning on its own. Somebody on reddit said that the people on apple discussions only like stuff from apple and nothing else, and as such shouldn't be used for questions like these, but I still decided to ask here anyways. Can anyone give me an honest opinion. Should I buy it, or would OnyX be better? Or none? Thanks!

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jan 29, 2019 9:49 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 7, 2019 11:34 AM

Are you familiar with them, because they actually recommend CleanMyMac and indicate it is safe.


"They" are being compensated or otherwise benefit from the products they promote.


You will not find a website that says "do not use this product" because no one profits from doing that. They will say it's "safe" or "recommended" or "highly regarded" or whatever. The reason is simple: 1: you have a Mac, therefore 2: you have money, and 3: they want it.


That is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the world's oldest story. It will never change.


"Cleaning" apps are scams. Excerpted from Effective defenses against malware and other threats:


Never install any product that claims to "clean up", "speed up", "optimize", "boost" or "accelerate" your Mac; to "wash" it, "tune" it, or to make it "shiny". Those claims are absurd.

  • Such products are very aggressively marketed. They are all scams.
  • They generally operate on the flawed premise that a Mac accumulates "junk" that needs to be routinely "cleaned out" for optimum performance.
  • Trial versions of those programs are successful because they provide the instant gratification of greater free disk space.
  • That increased space is the result of irreversible destruction of files, programs, or operating system components normally protected from inadvertent alteration or deletion. The eventual result will be unreliable operation, poor performance and random crashes that may not become evident for months or even years after their use, when updates to programs or macOS are eventually released.
  • Memory "cleaners" that circumvent macOS's memory management algorithms work by purging inactive memory contents to mass storage, which can only result in degraded performance and accelerated hardware failure.


Generally speaking the more aggressively a product or service is promoted, the more you should avoid it. "Cleaning" apps for both Macs and PCs have made a few people very, very wealthy. They have also left orders of magnitude more Mac owners very, very miserable. The cost in terms of wasted time, productivity, labor, lost data, anger and the general parade of horribles they cause must be incalculable.


Similar questions

8 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 7, 2019 11:34 AM in response to Tahoe56

Are you familiar with them, because they actually recommend CleanMyMac and indicate it is safe.


"They" are being compensated or otherwise benefit from the products they promote.


You will not find a website that says "do not use this product" because no one profits from doing that. They will say it's "safe" or "recommended" or "highly regarded" or whatever. The reason is simple: 1: you have a Mac, therefore 2: you have money, and 3: they want it.


That is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the world's oldest story. It will never change.


"Cleaning" apps are scams. Excerpted from Effective defenses against malware and other threats:


Never install any product that claims to "clean up", "speed up", "optimize", "boost" or "accelerate" your Mac; to "wash" it, "tune" it, or to make it "shiny". Those claims are absurd.

  • Such products are very aggressively marketed. They are all scams.
  • They generally operate on the flawed premise that a Mac accumulates "junk" that needs to be routinely "cleaned out" for optimum performance.
  • Trial versions of those programs are successful because they provide the instant gratification of greater free disk space.
  • That increased space is the result of irreversible destruction of files, programs, or operating system components normally protected from inadvertent alteration or deletion. The eventual result will be unreliable operation, poor performance and random crashes that may not become evident for months or even years after their use, when updates to programs or macOS are eventually released.
  • Memory "cleaners" that circumvent macOS's memory management algorithms work by purging inactive memory contents to mass storage, which can only result in degraded performance and accelerated hardware failure.


Generally speaking the more aggressively a product or service is promoted, the more you should avoid it. "Cleaning" apps for both Macs and PCs have made a few people very, very wealthy. They have also left orders of magnitude more Mac owners very, very miserable. The cost in terms of wasted time, productivity, labor, lost data, anger and the general parade of horribles they cause must be incalculable.


Jan 30, 2019 7:12 AM in response to Vinqk

If you like ticking time bombs on your system, buy CleanMyMac.

It will eventually destroy your system.


If you want a speedy system, don't install such crapware like clean up apps,

speed up apps, etc. as the most assuredly will create issues that they claim

to solve.


Unless you are a macOS expert avoid OnyX as it will allow you to do serious damage'

to your system. Then again, if you are a macOS expert, you don't need OnyX as all those

capabilities are available via the command line interface in Terminal.

Feb 7, 2019 10:13 AM in response to Niel

Niel, I have tried to find a credible, objective source to evaluate whether I should buy CleanMyMac X and I ended up with SoftwareHow.com because they seemed to meet my criteria. Are you familiar with them, because they actually recommend CleanMyMac and indicate it is safe. If you don't trust them, who do you trust?? Steve

Feb 7, 2019 10:38 AM in response to Tahoe56

I trust Niel. He has been here 18 years and does not get paid by advertisers like web site operators do.


The macOS is engineered to maintain itself. Third-party packages that claim to clean, optimize, tune-up, or change your Macs's nappies WILL interfere with what you paid Apple to build in. The conflicts result in slowdowns and instability. The developers of this stuff know that it is true so, by my definition, all those products are scams.


Not even Windows machines need all the fearware that is thrown daily at their owners as indispensable.


In the early days when OSX was still evolving, we needed some trusted third-party tools like Onyx, Cocktail, Tech Tools, and DiskWarrior to keep the wheels attached. However the current OSX is so highly evolved that I've not used third-party maintenance utilities since Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, introduced in 2007.


Go with Neil. He is the most credible source you can find.

Feb 7, 2019 10:41 AM in response to Tahoe56

I think you're referring to https://www.softwarehow.com/best-mac-cleaner/


I've never heard of that site before and you have one self-proclaimed expert vs. a couple of dozen people who have been helping others for decades on this forum. Mac cleaning tools in this day and ageare solutions in search of a problem (if you read the article the blogger kind of says that). The developers are happy to sell them to people who have switched from PCs and are used to buying those tools.


The only valid reason that article itself admits is freeing up space. But we know what is taking up space, the thousands of photos and videos. Cleaning up a dozen obsolete preferences files from 2005 isn't going to do anything. Furthermore, CleanMyMac is well documented on these forums (I was just helping somebody with a "slow Mac" issue 5 minutes ago) as slowing down a computer because it is constantly using resources. Also many of these tools mistakenly clean things which should not be cleaned (kind of like inviting your mother to clean your room). Sure, caches take up room, but they also speed up your computer booting and programs loading. If you're getting down on drive space where a GB or two of caches is mattering then you have more serious drive space issues and need to instead consider offloading files to external storage.


I'd say in the last decade or so I only ever needed to "clean" my Mac once, and that was when I was running old software which had generated a 2 GB text file of error logs before I noticed it. That was a case where the problem was resolved with dealing with the Applescript that was creating the error and deleting the log file.

Feb 7, 2019 10:45 AM in response to Tahoe56

Trust? You will see daily "My Mac is slow" topics here and frequently after being told to remove CleanMyMac the people say the problem has been solved.


Cleaning tools are being marketed at PC switchers who are used to having to buy such things for their PCs and the developers are very happy to sell them a solution in search of a problem.

MacPaw CleanMyMac X

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.