So you've had your Mac for a while, and things don't feel as fresh and clean as they used to? Although Macs don't require a lot of maintenance for cleaning, those temporary files, app leftovers, and system cache do accumulate. These files may slow down your machine and take up a lot of valuable space. In this article, we share quick and easy ways to clean up your MacBook. Let's get started!
Sep 17, 2020 To clean the display on your iMac, dampen the cloth that came with your iMac—or another clean, soft, lint-free cloth—with water only, and then wipe the screen. Don't clean the screen of your iMac with a cleaner containing acetone. Use a cleaner intended for use with a screen or display. Never spray cleaner directly on the screen. Clean your Mac's keyboard. Our last but not least advice is to wipe your Mac's keyboard. As you use your keyboard daily, it quickly gets dirty. Moreover, all those crumbs may live under the keys forever! If you were wondering how to clean Mac's keyboard, there are no special rules here.
How to clean your Mac automatically
Here's a simple diagram to explain the most common types of computer junk, sorted by size. Some of these, like Trash bin files, are easily reachable, while others are stored away in hidden system folders. Sadly, there's no easy way to clear them up without special skills.
If you don't feel like spending the next several hours cleaning your Mac manually, you can use a powerful cleaning tool CleanMyMac X to find and remove all the clutter your Mac contains. It knows which files are useless, how to find them and remove completely. CleanMyMac has everything to finish the 3-hour task of a Mac cleanup in under 5 minutes. It will even clean up the junk you didn't know about and give your computer a speed boost.
How to clean up system storage on Mac with CleanMyMac X:
- Download CleanMyMac X for free here.
- Run the app and go to System Junk.
- Click Scan.
- Press Clean to get rid of all junk.
Done! Now your Mac looks much better!
How to Clean Mac Hard Drive Manually
If you never performed an automatic or manual system cleaning — it means that your Mac has been collecting unnecessary files and clutter for years. You can quickly clean up your Mac with these easy steps.
1. Clean up cache
You've probably heard 'Remove your cache' as a web browser troubleshooting tip. In fact, your Mac stores a lot of information in files called caches, allowing fast access to that data and reducing the need to get it from the original source again. Unfortunately, those files take a lot of space on your Mac, and instead of speeding the things up, they slow your computer down. Therefore, if you want to give your system a boost, clean your Mac from the cache files.
There are two ways to do that: you can delete them manually or use a MacBook cleaner like CleanMyMac X to do the job for you. Of course, the second way is an easy and fast one. However, if you decide to clean up the cache manually, check out a comprehensive guide on 'How to Clear Cache on a Mac.'
2. Uninstall apps you don't use
The applications you've installed on your Mac take up space, of course. And over time when your Mac becomes full of different apps, it may start running slowly. How to clean MacBook? In the first place, you need to remove the apps you no longer use or need. To do this, right-click on the app you want to remove and choose Move to Bin.
You may be surprised to find out that sending an app to the Trash will not uninstall it completely because the app leftovers still remain on your Mac taking up a lot of storage. So, if you want to be a responsible Mac user, you need to uninstall applications the right way. Here's a step-by-step guide on 'How to Uninstall Apps on a Mac.'
Extra step: Trim down your login items
Login items are applications that run automatically upon startup. Nowadays, every second app tries to become as prominent as possible and get into your Login Items. First of all, you may not even know what they are (not all of them appear in the Dock). Secondly, such apps consume memory. That's enough reasons to get rid of extra login items you don't need.
- Open System Preferences.
- Go to Users & Groups.
- Choose your nickname on the right.
- Choose the Login Items tab.
- Check startup programs you want to remove.
- Press the '–' sign below.
You're done.
3. Clean out useless duplicates
Identical photos, music tracks you've added one time too many, saved and re-saved PDF files… all of that sits on your Mac and gobbles up storage. The storage that could be used for better purposes.
Extra step: Trim down your login items
Login items are applications that run automatically upon startup. Nowadays, every second app tries to become as prominent as possible and get into your Login Items. First of all, you may not even know what they are (not all of them appear in the Dock). Secondly, such apps consume memory. That's enough reasons to get rid of extra login items you don't need.
- Open System Preferences.
- Go to Users & Groups.
- Choose your nickname on the right.
- Choose the Login Items tab.
- Check startup programs you want to remove.
- Press the '–' sign below.
You're done.
3. Clean out useless duplicates
Identical photos, music tracks you've added one time too many, saved and re-saved PDF files… all of that sits on your Mac and gobbles up storage. The storage that could be used for better purposes.
So how do you quickly weed them out? The fastest way is to use Gemini 2: The Duplicate Cleaner.
- Download and launch the app
- Click 'Scan for Duplicates', and watch as it quickly fetches them from different corners of your Mac.
- Once the scan is done, hit Review Results and check which copies you want to remove.
- Click Smart Cleanup to delete everything you've selected.
That's it. Now your Mac should be completely duplicate-free.
4. Empty the trash
Even though you've deleted the files, they reside in your Trash bin taking up a lot of storage on your Mac. They are just waiting to be removed completely. If you want your precious hard drive space back, you need to empty the Trash.
Here's how to clean your MacBook from the trash:
- Click and hold on the Trash can icon in the Dock.
- Click Empty and then Empty Bin.
The process is quite simple, right? There is even a more effortless way to clear Trash. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac for junk and lets you remove all trashed files. To do that, launch CleanMyMac X and press Scan. When the scan is completed, click Review Details to see what exactly CleanMyMac X has found.
I've already cleaned Bin a couple of weeks before, but over some time, almost a gigabyte of trashed files has accumulated. Now, I can simply click Back to Summary and then Run to clean Trash and system junk.
5. Reduce clutter
Apple has already thought about the clutter that can be generated on the Macs and provided a possible solution. Here's how to reduce clutter on your Mac:
- Go to the Apple menu.
- Choose About This Mac and then Storage. Here you can see how much free space is left on your computer.
- Then click Manage.
Here're some recommendations for saving space on your Mac. You can choose Review Files to examine apps, documents, and other files that are stored on your Mac.
You can choose any file in every category (Applications, Bin, Documents, etc.) and click Delete to remove it and optimize space. Look through other recommendations and make the necessary changes to use your Mac's space more efficiently.
6. Delete large and old files
It has always been a rule of thumb among computer geeks, that you should keep a minimum of 15-20% of free space on your main hard drive. This is just a rough estimation, but the more free space you have, the faster your Mac works. A computer magazine once performed a test on this, which concluded that the difference in speed can reach as much as 35%. If you work with heavy graphics or video rendering, even more free space is recommended.
How to have more free space? Delete large and old files.
The first way is totally manual and requires you to find them one by one, while for the second way, you just need to make two clicks and CleanMyMac X will do the job for you.
How to clean up Mac with CleanMyMac X:
- Download CleanMyMac X (a link to a free edition of the app)
- Launch the program.
- Go to the Large and Old Files section on the menu.
- Click Scan.
- Review the details, select what to clean and then click Clean.
That's it!
7. Remove old iOS backups
Having your files backed up is a wonderful thing. But over time your Mac becomes overloaded with old backups that take gigabytes of storage on your hard drive. That's why you should consider removing the old iOS backups you no longer need. Things 2 8 9 download free.
Each backup remains stored on your computer and is accessible via iTunes. To delete the old backups, you need to do the following:
- Choose the Apple menu and then select About This Mac.
- Go to the Storage tab and click Manage.
- Here, choose iOS Files.
- Select the backup you want to remove and click Delete.
- Confirm and you're done!
That's it! The backup files are gone from your Mac forever.
8. Wipe out Language files
Unused language localizations take up about 1 GB of storage space. Mac applications come with language files for every language they support. It allows starting using the app in that language immediately. Cool, right? Not always. Just consider: when was the last time you used the app in Bengali or Korean? Since you don't speak those languages, such files just waste space on your Mac. You need to remove the unnecessary language files and clean MacBook from that clutter.
How to delete the language files? Go to Finder > Applications, then right-click the app which language files you want to remove and choose Show Package Contents. Open the Resources folder and then find folders ending with '.lproj.' Every folder contains language files for one particular language. Note that for every app you should manually find and select the files to remove. But there is an automatic way to delete the language files that will save you tons of time — CleanMyMac X. Just download the application (for free) and it will do the job for you.
9. Delete old DMGs
Disk images (DMGs) often take up valuable space on your Mac. Here's how to perform a Mac cleanup and get rid of those files:
- Open Finder and type 'disk image' in the search bar.
- Then delete all files that have .dmg extensions. Don't forget to remove them from Trash as well.
CleanMyMac X allows you to locate and delete DMGs quicker. With its System Junk module you can remove unused disk image in the single click of a button:
Just press Clean and it's done!
10. Remove duplicates
Useless copies of your documents, files, and photos eat up your Mac's precious space. Therefore, if you wonder how to clean up a Mac and boost its performance, try to delete the duplicates. Note that the process of finding and removing the duplicates requires either a lot of patience and time (if you decide to delete them manually) or a duplicate finder app. Whatever method you choose, make sure to check out this article on 'How to Find Duplicates on Mac.'
11. Tidy up your desktop
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Many people use Desktop as their primary destination for files. But this could be tricky because your OS treats every file on a desktop as an active window. When items on your desktop are too many, Finder gets substantially slower. This leads us to the most compelling advice in this article — cleaning up desktop does miracles!
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Rather than just leaving every file on your desktop, organize them into folders. The latest macOS does that automatically thanks to the Stacks feature. You can also use Google Drive, Dropbox or any external storage device to save your files and keep your desktop tidy.
12. Clean your Mac's keyboard
Our last but not least advice is to wipe your Mac's keyboard. As you use your keyboard daily, it quickly gets dirty. Moreover, all those crumbs may live under the keys forever!
If you were wondering how to clean Mac's keyboard, there are no special rules here. You can try blowing the dust and other particles out of your keyboard once in a while. Disinfecting wipes and alcohol-based sprays may also prove useful. Just choose the piece of fabric and wipe the keys gently to make them clean and shiny!
All in all, be careful with your system files. Don't delete things you're not sure about. If you are not completely confident that you can manage the task by yourself, better use a dedicated utility like CleanMyMac X to get a fresh and clean Mac in just two clicks. Here's the video describing quick tips to clean up your Mac:
Happy cleaning!
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Getting frustrated with my slow iMac will get me nowhere. The initial reaction if the iMac is slow is that I delete a couple of applications and software to widen its memory space; however, that would never solve the problem. There are still a few hidden data and applications inside my iMac that is still hogging the disk space. They should be manually removed so that my iMac runs in a smooth condition, or simplify the jobs with the iMac cleaner.
Some applications automatically (or when asked) set themselves as a 'startup item', which causes them to open at every restart or login. You can find out what is in your startup items list by navigating to Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. You may be surprised at how many there are. To remove them, simply select the item by clicking on its name and then hit the 'minus' button at the bottom of the list. However, be sure that you know what you're removing; otherwise, you may kill some critical function for the next time you restart.
While System Preferences is open, take a look at a few other things. Apple has generously included a number of very useful features as preferences. Some, however, may not be useful to you, such as Universal Access (which offers help for visually and hearing impaired users) or Bluetooth (which allows certain devices to be used wirelessly). If you don't use these features, verify that they are turned off. This will save you some valuable RAM and processor resources.
There may be other things hogging your processor's attention or sucking up RAM. How will you know about them? By using Apple's Activity Monitor, which comes with Mac OS X. Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU usage, RAM requirements, virtual memory usage, and whether a given application is a PowerPC or Intel (Universal) build. Check it occasionally to see if there are any red flags - or keep it running for a few days (with one of the useful Dock icons or floating windows enabled) to keep an eye on when things are spiking.
It doesn't matter how large your hard drive is - eventually it will begin to fill up. Whether it is a huge iPhoto library, some videos you're editing, or simply an accumulation of lots of 'stuff', a full hard drive can cause problems. (One colleague couldn't figure out why her drive was so full - until she realized that she hadn't emptied her Trash in almost four years!) You may not realize that Mac OS X (and the Classic Mac OS, too) uses the free space on your hard drive as 'virtual memory', and it depends heavily on that virtual memory to run efficiently. If you're starting to feel sluggish, it may be because your drive is too full.
Whenever things get slow on my iMac, one of the 'go to' solutions is to run a cleaner like EaseUS CleanGenius. It is a handy all-in-one utility to fast clean Mac junk files, show disk space available and monitor the disk space usage. It maintains and keeps your Mac at the peak performance.
Highlighted features of EaseUS CleanGenius
Clean up Mac fast: You can free more space on your Mac disk keeping your Mac healthy at all times. With a simple click from the utility, all junk files (System Caches, User Caches, System Logs, User Logs, User Downloads, Trash, Safari Internet Cache and more) will be removed in just a matter of seconds.
Monitor disk space: It will show you the disk space available and will alert you in advance if the disk space is already running low. You can clean or move files to free up disk space to ensure that your Mac is running smoothly.
Disk Ejector: Using this one will allow you to eject the mounted drives, such as external storage disks, CD and DVD disks, SuperDrive, network storage and disk images.
Browser Plug-ins Cleanup: Support to clean up and remove browsers such as Safari, Chrome or Firefox plugins, cache, and cookies. Your browsing histories, bookmarks and downloaded files won't be cleaned.
Mac Uninstaller: 'Uninstall Applications' safely and completely remove applications and their components, preferences, log files, etc. Select an application, just one click, the application and its additional components will be removed.
Duplicates Finder: Duplicate files have the identical contents and waste the precious disk space. CleanGenius can easily find and remove duplicate files to reclaim the wasted disk space.
Disk Usage: Visualize the size of your files & folders and remove the unwanted large files to free up more disk space.
Free Memory: When the free memory of your Mac is insufficient, you can easily use CleanGenius to free memory and speed up your Mac for better performance.
Set Login Items: Unneeded applications may auto run every time when you start Mac. This will reduce your Mac performance. If you don't want an application to start every time you launch your Mac, just open CleanGenius and disable the startup items you find annoying.
