should I buy clean my mac 2 or is there another app I should use?

woodybrando wrote:

Thomas_r, in my experience, a manual system clean up of OSx has fixed a dying iMac

I hesitate to step back into a two-year-old thread where everything that needs to be said has already been said. However, since you addressed this to me personally, I'll answer.

Sometimes, caches do go bad. This is very rare - I've never actually seen this happen, and I've been using OS X since the very first version - but it can happen. If this happens, deleting the caches can be manually done extremely easily. Assuming that clearing the caches actually fixed your Mac, that was undoubtedly the problem.

However, using a program like CleanMyMac to clear caches on a routine basis is pointless and, frankly, harmful to the performance of your system. Plus, CleanMyMac has been repeatedly implicated in actually causing system issues, by removing things it shouldn't have. Most of the other "cleaning" utilities on the market are even worse, often being installed alongside adware (aka, "ad-injection malware").

Like I originally posted I've seen first hand one of my iMac's resurrected by "cleaning". And yes at the time I had the same view as you, I thought the "cleaning" process was useless but I was proven wrong as it's been 2 months now and my iMac hasn't had a black screen of death once since that day. It had been having them atleast once a day beforehand. So you saying that the "cleaning" process is useless is counter to my own experience.

Plus, on the Apple Support call "cleaning" wasn't the first thing the tech was going to do, he was going through their regular protocol and I was describing the constant beach balls, hard crashes and how I was convinced it was a hardware issue and he said okay lets try this and he had me delete libraries, cache, safari cache, things like that, a system cleaning basically. So why would the Apple Tech's have a system cleaning protocol if as you say it doesn't get "dirty"? Especially since it actually fixed my computer.

And again I can't say anything about whether or not CleanMyMac is good or bad just bought it last night in the hope it does the same thing the Apple Support Tech did. So far I ran it once, cleared 7.5 gigs of files on my 2nd iMac and till I have to finish my next show I won't know if it's helped. But my assistant and I both were having problems using the 2nd iMac while finishing this week's episode and it was either call Tech Support again or find some software that does the same thing. And these are not old low spec'd iMacs:

1st iMac:

Late 2013 27" iMac

32gb Ram

1tb spin drive

2gb VRAM

Bought used a year ago

2nd iMac:

Late 2013 27" Mac

32gb Ram

256 SSD

4gb Vram

Bought new 8 months ago

The 2gb vram one is the one that tech support fixed by "cleaning." The 4gb vram one is the one that just started getting a little weird and needed to be rebooted multiple times during edit sessions this week and I just ran CleanMyMac 3 on it last night.

Next time I finish an episode on my 2nd iMac will be in two weeks and I'll report back.

So.. you had a specific problem and trashing the caches solved it. That's called trouble shooting. Routinely using these apps is what's pointless and possibly dangerous. Remember trashing cache files will slow your Mac down. I wonder what those 7.5 gigs of files it deleted were. Do you know?