In the most recent episode of ATP, there was a discussion on the use of ulities like CleanMyMac. It was surprising to me that ATP hosts DO NOT use these ultities.
Interesting discussion:
I personally, have been using CleanMyMac for years. To be honest, when it does its smart scan, I actually have no clue what its doing. I am assuming its giving my mac a clean. I always thought it was like servicing your computer, similar to servicing your car.
Other features I use is the uninstaller and updater.
This may sound weird, but whenever I do a CleanMyMac âcleanupâ, I feel good. Not sure if it actually made any difference to my Macbookâs performance. But it feels good.
Therefore, my question for the commnuity is whether macOS needs these kind of âcleanupâ utilities?
Similar to what @Graemes said I only use Hazelâs app uninstall function on a regular basis. Otherwise I donât feel drive clutter is a major problem.
I absolutely love CMMX and would never consider being without it, especially with my tiny SSD in my iMac. It routinely finds dozens of Gbs to clean and it makes my life so very much easier.
Iâve never been a fan of clean up apps. They werenât available when I started and I learned to maintain computers through trial and error.
I did have a couple of executives that insisted on installing âhelper programsâ (one may have been cleanmymac) and eventually their computers would develop problems. Removing the apps fixed the problem, but eventually the users would reinstall the apps and the process repeated. To be fair, it may not have been an individual app, but the combination of too many âhelpersâ.
Some years ago I started using Hazel and I do allow it to help uninstall programs. Frequently I follow up with a manual search and cleanup of anything Hazel may have missed.
If you stick to well known and reviewed apps, and you think they will work for you, itâs your Mac and your money, go for it. But if you start having âwhy did that happen?â type problems you might want to remove them to see if your problems disappear.
Iâm with the ATP guys, your mac will manage itself pretty well, and aside from leaving cruft about when deleting apps, thereâs no need to run scripts.
As others have said, Hazel will delete unwanted cruft from delete apps and has many other useful features too.
CleanMyMac X does far more than running scripts. Two of the 13 items in the main menu are the types of scripts they talk about. I use it to easily spot stuff I can remove from my hard drive â vital when I was running on a 512GB system â and my favourite bit, updating apps.
Rather than updating apps when I actually want to be using them, I periodically run the check here. It doesnât always succeed with every app (a couple of mine seem to flummox it) but it does give you at the very least a list of out of date apps you can address directly or from CMMX.
This is very interesting to me. I had used CMM for years but when I was having mail issues, the Apple tech suggested I deleted it. I reinstalled yesterday (it deleted 10G of stuff) but mail got a bit weird again. Iâm going to check today and if itâs still an issue, I will learn out to uninstall with Hazel.
Every time I run Clean My Mac I get about 5GB of space back. I donât need 5GB back but I suspect it all adds up. (It wouldnât be as much as 5GB times the number of runnings but some proportion of that.)
So Iâm a happy user of a reputable product. But I totally get their points about disk performance. (I do mainframe performance for a living and tune disks as part of it so I can corroborate what John said about how it used to work and how it now works.) The interesting bit was about CPU cost of disorganised data but he and I would probably agree thatâs a nit (except for extreme edge cases).
Since itâs included in Setapp, I use Cleanmymac. Is it essential? No. Are there alternatives? Yes. Is any âcleanerâ necessary? No.
So, why do I use it? Easy uninstalls, and I like the âshow updatesâ feature. The âcleanâ gives me back some GB (which are quickly filled again). Huge gain? No. Does it have any disadvantage? No.
To add on this: I experienced a wonky âbug/featureâ in CleanMyMac X. I use âCanon Print Studio Proâ to print photos. And sometimes it stopped working. Reinstalled it, worked again. Had this problem severaly times, so I kept the DMG on my Mac to quickly reinstall. I found out that CleanMyMac Xâs âScan&Cleanâ feature was killing it. I only did a very superficial investigation. It seems CPSP stores something vital in a temporary/cache folder, which CMMX of course deletes. A program shouldnât do that (rely on user cache), but it still happens. Maybe that problem also applies to other programs.
Perfect 
