Is there a better alternative to CleanMyMac?

John

Even what you quote does not say what the other person says he said.

My query was to see if there could be a better product that Apple would recommend.

Apple doesn't recommend any third-party software to "clean up" or "speed up" a Mac automatically. Any software that purports to do that is a scam.

Apple's App Store sells MacPaw Inc's Clean my Drive and other apps

Availability in the App Store is not an endorsement by Apple. The App Store is full of garbage software of all kinds. Most software is garbage. Creating software that is not garbage is one of the most difficult acts of human creativity, and few can do it. For the end user, finding the good software amid all the garbage is also difficult.

I know from experience that my Macs have slowed down

That is a discrete technical problem, not an issue of routine maintenance. Scam "utilities" like "CleanMyMac" don't help you solve such a problem. They can only help you create more problems.

It's physically possible for any Mac in full working order, if it can run the current version of OS X, to carry outbasic tasks without excessive beachballing, as long as it has at least 4 GB of memory and 9 GB of available space on the startup volume. If that's not happening for you, then either the machine is not in full working order or it's misconfigured in some way.

This site is not a very good place to look for help with a technical problem like yours, but if you want to try, you should first search for answered questions similar to yours, and if you don't find a solution that way, start a new discussion with a descriptive title and only the facts—not with your assumptions about what's causing the problem or how it should be solved. You'll have as good a chance as anyone else of getting a useful response.

There is nothing wrong with people using 3rd party software to make their lives easier and get more enjoyment and less hassle from their Apple products. Instead of trashing an entire category of software, we should be helping people find the best solutions and avoid the well-known troublemakers. Even if they have the technical ability, many people purchased Apple products so they wouldn't have to do this kind of low-level digging and hacking just to keep the machine from locking up on a regular basis. But it isn't fair to say such things are necessary on one hand and then claim that any app that makes the process easier is a scam.

There are a small handful of scam-ware apps that have blanketed the underbelly of the internet with their ads. They are not going to be hurt by a few people complaining here on Apple Support Communities. We aren't helping anyone by telling people to avoid useful utilities from developers who don't have the marketing budget of the scam-ware vendors.

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francoontarienOttawa wrote:

The word "TRUST" is crucial when we are learning how to care for any item that we have. So who does one trust? The community provides all kinds of information for example on how to defrag a Mac : (How to safely defrag a Mac's hard drive).

What to believe then with such conflicting information?

Bonjour encore francoontarienOttawa,

That is an excellent question and very good example. However, I don't see any real conflict. The user tip you posted is a good one, but it is a couple of years old. It says right at the start that Macs don't need to be defragmented. But, if you want to do it, it provides instructions. If this user tip were frequently cited as an effective way to noticeably improve performance, then it might be a good idea. If so, there would be no logical reason to denigrate a reliable and safe utility that made the defragmentation easier. But all of that is theoretical. Macs have never needed to be defragmented and modern Macs with SSDs really don't need defragmenting.

So, the answer to your excellent question is...it depends. If someone really, really wanted to defrag their old mechanical hard drive, this procedure would be far safer than any tool that promoting defragging as a useful "clean up" task. Certain software programs are labeled "scam-ware" because of a history of suspicious business practices, "clean up" operations that are actually dangerous, and because people tend to report that removing them makes their machines faster and more reliable.

If there is a specific task you want to do or a problem you want to solve, you should be able to do it easily and safely. It shouldn't matter whether or not some anonymous stranger on an internet web forum thinks you need to do it or not. If there is some 3rd party utility that makes that task easier to perform or makes the problem more easily resolved, then there is no reason you shouldn't use it if you want to. Blanket statements saying that "the whole 'utility' software industry for the Mac is a fraud" are flat-out wrong. Depending on what you need or want to do, there may be utilities that will help.

Don't get me wrong. Some programs are scams. But relying on the Mac App Store or the developer's own website is simply not going to help. For one thing, the requirements of the Mac App Store are going to severely limit the tasks that a utility could perform. One of the most common adware installers is MPlayerX that delivers adware right from the developer's website to your Mac. If you get an adware infection, most Mac anti-virus software will not be able to help you. It is very common to see people with both adware and anti-virus installed on the same Mac. But one particular Mac anti-malware utility, MalwareBytes for Mac, is very effective at removing adware.

So who do you trust? What do you do? Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for you. Like Linc Davis, I've become disappointed by Apple Support Communities. I now only respond to a thread where someone is having some kind of problem with EtreCheck, a "utility" I developed. I even added a big disclaimer to EtreCheck warning users that I am not responsible for any suggestions they might get on this site. Obviously, I am biased in favour of "utility" software. 🙂 But ultimately, I have had to reluctantly admit that there is simply too much misinformation on the internet and on Apple Support Communities than I can fix. I will just focus on EtreCheck instead. Comme Candide dirait «il faut cultiver mon jardin».

Nowhere did I say that a person should not embrace useful applications. My point was simple. nealt2 was overstating what LInc already overstates excessively, his post from 5:58 being an excellent example of that. But even a stopped clock is right twice per day...

Well, we are already very close to some Apple "moderation" in this thread so we should probably wrap up. I do understand your point. If this were just regular people making typically overstated internet arguments, then there would be no point in fighting about it. It would be better to just let such things go. But I don't feel that is true in this case. When the overstatements are prepared in advance, calculated, and systematic, I don't fault nealt2 for overstatements in calling him on it.

dont confuse windows maintenance requirements with OS X requirements, they are both OS's but how they manage their structural data is very different. I currently service both OS's for close to two decades in corporate offices across the North East and it's common for Windows IT staff to think Mac OS needs to be treated like Windows but it is a flawed concept, avoid it. Most everyone here has given you correct advice on how to approach maintaining a working mac, but if you persist on thinking in terms of "I know windows" you will undoubtedly get yourself into serious trouble.

but if you persist on thinking in terms of "I know windows" you will undoubtedly get yourself into serious trouble.

Sage advice, Jimmy.

Excellent counsel, IMHO.

You know show much depends on what you want to do with your Mac.

1. A casual user who does e-mail, word processing and occasional image processing.

2. A user who is using their Mac in a professional envoiornment.

3. The user in which computers are a hobby and like to experiment, try beta software, etc.

It also depends on your hardware.

I am number 3. On my MacPro I have 7 hard disks with a total of 11 partitions, One one HD I have a "Clean copy of El Capitan which I try not to touch. I have a copy of El Capitan on another HD which I do beta stuff. I have an El Capitan working disk on my SSD where I do my main work, I have external HDs which backup my SSD and my Data disk. I have a Time machine disk. I have a Maverick disk and a Mountain Lion disk just for the fun of it.

So if something goes wrong I can always go back. All I lose is time. I am retired so I have it.

I belong to a computer group of retired people who are Mac and PC users. The PC users are always complaining about registry problems and virus issues. The Mac users get bored. Their only problem seems to be when Apple, Microsoft, or Adobe updates software. A complaint of PC users as well. These people do not as a rule experiment with software.

So so much depends on how you use your computer.

etresoft wrote:

It is true that the Mac doesn't need any routine maintenance. However, it is also true that Macs have slowed down. I maintain virtual machines to test EtreCheck on all supported versions of OS X since 10.6 "Snow Leopard". They all run fine in a virtual machine up until Yosemite. When I ran a Yosemite VM inside a Yosemite VM it was practically unusable. Then, when I upgraded to El Capitan, the Yosemite VM officially became too slow to be useable.

The key reason Yosemite and El Capitan don't run well inside a Yosemite VM is because they are designed to use the very GPU heavily. Yosemite went a long way in this direction, and El Capitan pushed it further. Your benchmark is really measuring the ability of the VM to share the GPU not the OS performance in any domain it was designed to operate in. This is not something that will affect a typical end-user.

IME, (based on clusters of real machines and real users) as long as a machine either (a) has an i3 processor or later and at least 4GB ram or (b) has at least a core 2 Duo and 8GB RAM, Yosemite and El Capitan provide a very good user experience.

C.

cdhw wrote:

The key reason Yosemite and El Capitan don't run well inside a Yosemite VM is because they are designed to use the very GPU heavily. Yosemite went a long way in this direction, and El Capitan pushed it further. Your benchmark is really measuring the ability of the VM to share the GPU not the OS performance in any domain it was designed to operate in. This is not something that will affect a typical end-user.

Hello cdhw,

Yes, I know. It is not a benchmark, but a test environment. Obviously my virtualized, unaccelerated graphics system isn't going to perform well. But 10.6-10.9 work fine. 10.10 is really slow. After I went from 10.10 to 10.11 on the host OS, my 10.10 guest OS was too slow to even be worth the disk space. A virtual environment is going to dramatically show even the slightest inefficiencies.

IME, (based on clusters of real machines and real users) as long as a machine either (a) has an i3 processor or later and at least 4GB ram or (b) has at least a core 2 Duo and 8GB RAM, Yosemite and El Capitan provide a very good user experience.

Of course I also test with real machines. I saw right away that my old mechanical hard disks weren't going to cut it anymore and upgraded to an SSD. So it is important to remember that my "unusable" virtual environment is also running from an SSD. I went from VMs running fine on a spinning hard drive with 10.9 to unusable with an SSD in 10.11.

But going beyond that, I have seen how older machines perform with 10.10+. Aside from the horrible long boot time, they do work fine with 4 GB RAM - as long as you don't exceed 4 GB RAM. Before 10.10, the RAM requirements were much less and when you started swapping, the machine slowed down. Since 10.10, 4 GB is an absolute minimum and once you start swapping to a spinning hard drive, the machine stops cold. I have seen this with my own eyes. A 3 Ghz Mac with 4 GB RAM was locked up worse than my old 200 Mhz NT machine circa 1999 when the AV kicked in.

I used to develop large satellite imagery ingest systems for the US government. My software ran on multiple 20+ core Linux servers with 10 Gig ethernet and 27 TB just for cache. I would do development and functionality tests on my 2010 MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM. Obviously I couldn't do massive 1 TB datasets but I could do more modest datasets. This was a .gov machine so it ran 10.6.8 for a long, long time. Sometimes I would slip up and attempt to test some dataset from a big commercial imagery satellite. That made my Mac really slow. But this was nothing compared to a more powerful iMac with 10.10 and running nothing more than Evernote and Chrome.

So yeah, I have other data points. 🙂

Hi francoontarienOttawa,

As a long time Mac owner/user, and an occasional user of these Apple Discussion forums, I've always found Linc Davis's observations and advice to be characterised by integrity, honesty, competency, advanced knowledge and his suggestions to be directly applicable to the issue that one has raised.

FYI