9.5
There is a good chance that in the search of a perfect Mac cleaning utility you will come across MacPaw’s CleanMyMac. CleanMyMac 3 is brought up in almost every discussion on the topic of Mac cleaning. Needless to say, that overtime the app has gained plenty of enthusiastic supporters as well as diehard opponents, which made finding non-biased opinions that much more difficult. So, is CleanMyMac worth the money? — Lets try and get this figured out to help you make the right choice.
CleanMyMac 3 features a number of cleaning and utility tools. Cleaning tools mostly erase System, Photos, and iTunes ‘junk’ as well as remove Mail attachments, delete Trash files across all users and apps. CleanMyMac 3 also makes finding old large files easier. Among the Utilities you will find an app uninstaller, privacy sweeper, login items manager, and a file shredder. Some of these are just nicely wrapped system settings, with a few tweaks, that were already on your Mac doing their job just fine (at least the folks at Apple thought so).
Priced at $40 for an activation key to the full version on a single computer, but also providing a free trial with some fairly heavy limitations, MacPaw’s pricing can feel a little steep considering the existence of alternative solutions that offer similar functionality and are more budget friendly. Rumbling aside, MacPaw has developed a visually pleasing app that is easy to get a hang of. The cleaning options it provides work as promised for the most part.
It should also be pointed out that ‘junk’ cleaning mainly removes temporary caches, logs, and tinkers with your apps to remove binaries and languages. Notably, not all of there files are worth removing and you should always be reviewing files before you let CleanMyMac erase them for good.
For example, removing Spotify cache would free up some storage, but also cause the app to download your songs library again, which would quickly reclaim the space. Not much of cleaning or speeding up done here.
After using the app for some time, the most useful features have proven to be Uninstaller and Large & Old Files. If you have to install various applications (e.g. for review purposes), deleting them in a bulk along with all additional files feels superior to Mac’s native process. Also the resetting feature can come in handy once or twice.
You have to give MacPaw the props for making uninstallation of CleanMyMac 3 hassle-free. The process of completely removing the application from your Mac is on par with the way you would delete any other app using MacPaw’s utility. That is because, to everyone’s surprise, it can uninstall itself from within the app! Isn’t this just brilliant?! Open CleanMyMac 3, go to Uninstaller and select CleanMyMac 3 in the list of apps, make sure all the files in the right section are selected and hit Uninstall.
For those of you who do not feel like trusting CleanMyMac with uninstalling itself from your Mac, here are the steps on how to do it manually:
CleanMyMac 3 makes an impression of a well-polished and safe piece of software. While the most useful features — Uninstaller and Large & Old Files — come free, unlocking app’s full potential will cost. Frankly, some features are there for the numbers only, and it makes you question the 40-dollar price tag for a single key. You are better off making the most of your trial features to see how much you really use them, before considering the full purchase.
