Best way to clean up my Macbook Pro

MacMe4Ever wrote:

What is the best way to clean up my Macbook Pro in order to make it run faster and increase space?

Do some basic house keeping...

SSD like to have 15-20% free storage at all times, more than the 10-20% of an old mechanical HDD

How to free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

Free up storage space - Apple Support

Catlike, Macs clean themselves and have for over 20 years. You paid Apple to create elegant and automated self-maintenance routines and include them in macOS. Let your mac be a Mac.

Except for the storage getting too full ( that's for the user to monitor), these built-in self-maintenance routines do ALL the housekeeping needed in the wee hours of the morning or at next idle time. They even defrag, and you need do nothing to enjoy this kind of software sophistication.

EVERY so-called third-party "cleaning" app interferes with that Apple elegance and we've seen scads of reports here where removing useless third-party software sped up sluggish Macs.

I concur 100% with MacMike's excellent recommendation to post an Etrecheck report. It can, in one more post on your part, allow us a data-driven evaluation of what could be causing your slowdowns. Data means no guessing in our part.

The report may not say much to someone who has never read one, but the senior contributors here have read thousands of them and can spot issue that a first-time user may not notice. That is why Etrecheck was intended to have its results posted in ASC. It it the only form of data-based remote troubleshooting we have.

It will also show us your Macbook Pro sub-model, a key bit of info we are missing but need for investigating performance issues. After all, Macbook Pros have been in continuous production for 18 years in hundreds of variants.

I would also recommend downloading/installing/running a free app Etrecheck, then report back here, posting the complete report here using the Additional Text feature in the Reply window (third from the right icon at the bottom of the Reply window). In many cases it lets us pinpoint possible issues that can cause your Mac to become sluggish.

Etrecheck does not reveal any private data, nor is it malware. It's simply a diagnostic report tool that we can analyze to help resolve your issue.