I saw many tech YouTubers promo this thing, is cool and useful to have or it's just a legal unnecessary scam? haha
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CleanMyMac X worth it?
- Thread starter AstroRexaur
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I wouldn't call it a scam. I believe the developers believe in the product and try to make a worthwhile product. Its usefulness however we can debate from here to the moon. I would say it depends how tech-y you are. If you aren't at all, do not touch it. If you are very tech-y, spending regular time with the command line and such, you probably won't benefit much from it. If you're in between there are some use cases where you might benefit from it for finding no-longer useful files belonging to apps that once lived on your system, but there are other free tools out there too
I'm not techy and I love CleanMyMac X. It's very easy to use with a great interface. Does it actually do anything useful? Well, it gets rid of a ton of junk, checks for malware, will check and install updates on software that never alerted me that there was an update, will do a complete uninstall of software for me.
I dig it
I dig it
I would never allow that garbage anywhere near my hard disk... probably not a "scam" in the truest sense, but it causes more problems that it solves...
OnyX seems to be highly recommended here instead of the app you mentioned:
www.titanium-software.fr
Titanium Software | Operating System Utilities for Mac - OnyX
OnyX is a multifunction utility that you can use to verify the startup disk and the structure of its system files; run cleaning and computer maintenance tasks; configure some hidden parameters of many Apple applications; and more.
Could you elaborate so we know why to avoid, it would be good to know what issues or problems you know about.
😀👍
I've been using CleanMyMac since it came out. It absolutely does what it promisses, and I never saw it causing problems.
At the very least, it "cleans" files and "recovers" space - stuff like log files that will come back as you use your Mac. These are largely files that the macOS system itself deletes when the storage is needed... and at the worst, it can cause issues with apps failing to run... I had issues with Activity Monitor failing to launch after running this software on one of my Macs, and I had other "annoyances", like lost wallpapers, etc ... this was about 6 years ago, and the company has updated the app many times in that period, but one time was enough for me... obviously YMMV, as this software seems to have a cult-like following. But it won't run it on any of my Macs, ever again. If you must install this thing, keep a system backup handy. You've been warned.
Same here. I know it's "cool" to dunk on tools like CleanMyMac, but I've been using it for years on all of my Mac OS devices.... I've never had any problems but I HAVE noticed a significant savings in disk space and performance.
I'm not interested in trying to convince anyone to change their mind about these tools, but to offer a different perspective for those who are seeking.
Been using it for some years on the office machines for certain tasks, along with other tools as Onyx, which is a must-have tool and free but does different stuff. So far no harm done and a comfortable way to get rid of caches, finding old files, uninstalling apps and so on. There are many alternative tools, like Daisy Disk for finding large/old files, but for some basic maintenance with one tool, it works nicely. No missing files or other annoyances I can report of, frankly. We have 10 or so licenses and on my personal machine I recently started using it as part of SetApp.
Does Onyx do anything that CleanMyMac doesn't? i used to use Onyx
I wouldn't call it a scam product but I also wouldn't say that it's at all necessary.
onyx has fewer features (basically doing maintenance), but seems to dig a bit deeper and gives you different tools like settings or access to specific files. It’s free and if you do not want to tweak your Mac on Terminal level with code, it is a great tool. CMM is more about freeing up space. You can erase language files, universal code, old big files, it can update some sideloaded MacOS-Apps and temporarily get rid of excess baggage in the system such as Time Machine shadow copies, caches, downloaded Mail attachements etc. — things you can do yourself but it’s worth the money to have a Leatherman-kind of tool for it with a nice UI. I don’t use the monitoring features and so on, just now & then do some housecleaning with it.
I used Cleanmymac recnelty to remove a old piece of software which didn't have an uninstall, and I needed to do it quickly. It worked. But now I feel the software is a little bit invasive. The quick menu you can't turn off (I've tried). There are some other features which seem helpful, but generally mirror what is already built into the OS.
It is not. You can manually do what it does. The software that claims to clean up your computer generally is bloatware and will actually take away resources.
The real scam is MacKeeper. This actually installed viruses on my Dad's computer + forced the Safari default search to a fraudulent website that was a pale copy of Google + it ran hidden code to re-install itself when removed.
I think cleanmymac is ok, but given how apps are installed on macOS, much of the work can easily be done the user. It's not hard but it can involve going into /Library and ~/Library so for the small dollar amount they're charging, having an automated app do that, is perfectly acceptable.
