CleanMyMac allows you to get rid of various junk files on your Mac: caches, preferences, extensions and other support data of apps. It is a popular Mac uninstaller; however, for various reasons you may need to delete CleanMyMac from the macOS system. This vid explains how to uninstall CleanMyMac 3 manually. If you wanna do a new & clean (re)installation, hit Le. Speed up your Mac in a few clicks with CleanMyMac 3. After three years of hard work, my MacBook Pro was starting to feel tired. But all it took to bring it back up to snuff was CleanMyMac 3. This wikiHow will teach you the best way to clean your MacBook Air. Dust, dirt, crumbs, fingerprints—it all adds up over time until one day you realize your computer no longer has the shine and luster it used to.

At a glance

Our Verdict

CleanMyMac 3 is MacPaw’s catch-all utility to scan your Mac and remove gigabytes of assorted cruft and gunk that builds up over time.

Like its previous versions, CleanMyMac 3 works to identify and remove generally unused, developer-oriented, extraneous, and backup files associated with your most commonly used applications in order to free up disk space. CleanMyMac 3’s selection of tests has grown to add tools such as an uninstaller, general maintenance, online privacy functions, and a file shredder. This is on top of the Smart Cleanup, System Junk, iPhoto Junk, Mail Attachments, iTunes Junk, Trash Bins, and Large & Old Files scans that comprise the cleaning utilities, making CleanMyMac 3 a worthy catch-all Mac utility.

All of these tests can be customized and configured as needed—using a better preference layout than was found in CleanMyMac 2. While a given test might tell you that you can reclaim a certain number of gigabytes by deleting files, CleanMyMac 3 gives you fine control over which files are deleted.

Despite adding several new scans and tests, CleanMyMac 3 still holds together—the new features don’t feeling bolted on and the app doesn’t feel overly bloated. The tests can be configured, there’s a good range of preferences, and extensive information about your Mac’s hardware—including a health status for your hard drives, remaining battery life for a notebook, and available RAM—show good attention to detail. A scheduler allows you to setup reminders to run tests, and the tests themselves work as advertised.

CleanMyMac 3 comes in handy in a world filled with incredibly fast but still relatively small solid state drives, where regaining a dozen or so gigabytes of space certainly isn’t a bad thing. On my late 2013 model Mac Pro, with its minimal 256GB flash storage, CleanMyMac 3 was able to retrieve 18.1GB of storage space, and the computer ran without a hitch afterwards.

To its credit, MacPaw took the CleanMyMac 2’s more-frenetic-than-a-happy-puppy user interface and dialed it down a bit, which makes it a bit more helpful in the current version. CleanMyMac 3 also includes a brief explanation about what each test does and what it repairs. This doesn’t go into developer-level explanations, but it serves to tell you what you’re about to do, what changes will be made, and gives you sufficient information prior to clicking the Scan or Clean button.

This dovetails nicely with the program’s access to preference files and settings that might be a little hard to find if you’re a casual user. For example, the Privacy module allows easy access to cookies, saved passwords, and other preferences for your web browser of choice, saving you some digging around in preference and extension menus by putting these things in one location.

If there’s one caveat, it’s that CleanMyMac 3 attempted to launch itself during the interrupt screens that sometimes come up when running another application. This was easily worked around by configuring the preferences to ignore these interrupts, but it’s also a behavior I’ve never seen before.

Bottom line

CleanMyMac 3 is in a tough, competitive field against other all-in-one/spring cleaning utilities for the Mac, including the oft-hated MacKeeper, and one could argue that its assorted freeware/shareware utilities can achieve similar results, while CleanMyMac 3 costs $40 for new users and $20 for upgrade users. Still, it’s nice to be able to remove gigabytes of dregs from your Mac; the program and its tests work well, it can be readily configured as needed, and is worthy of your consideration.

EDIT: This article is now out of date. Clean My Mac X is now released – check our review here.

Clean My Mac 3 Review

Updated for 2018: We last looked at Clean My Mac 3 back in 2015 – 3 years and a number of OSX releases have passed since that time so we figured it was time to revisit this review.

Clean My Mac 3 Tr

Installation follows the standard OSX installation, as shown to the left. It’s very easy – drag and drop the icon into the Applications folder and that’s it – Clean My Mac 3 is now installed. Simply open up Finder, choose Applications and double click on the Clean My Mac 3 icon to start the cleaning process.

The app starts up with a fancy new video which is a little superfluous but does add to the overall polish of the application. Then, you’re presented with the familiar looking screen from which everything is managed. Click the round Scan button at the bottom and wait a little while for CleanMyMac3 to scan your system and see what it can find. This might take a little while, depending on how fast your Mac is and how much disk space you have used. The new CleanMyMac scans for what it calls ‘System Junk’ which includes extraneous localizations, unused language files, old logs, old cache files and broken application data amongst other things. My MacBook Pro with an SSD drive took about a minute for CMM3 to decide it had found a lot of things it could clean up.

I generally think that I run a fairly tidy ship on my Mac. CleanMyMac would dispute that notion quite strenuously it would appear. The System Junk scan alone found 1.9 Gigabytes of cruft, and on closer inspection I’m pretty certain that almost all of it can quite happily be discarded. Do go through the list though, there may be stuff that CMM thinks is junk that perhaps isn’t. That, in itself, would be enough – indeed that pretty much was enough with Clean My Mac 2. But this new version goes even further – scanning and finding superfluous files in your iPhoto library (which sadly doesn’t appear to include duplicate files – or at least doesn’t appear to scan the iCloud shared photos, since I know that ALL my photos are duplicated, which is highly annoying). CleanMyMac 3 then scans for extra iTunes data and unused files, old and out of date Mail Attachments and perhaps best of all, Large and Old Files. In my case it found 17 Gigabytes of large and old files – most of which I had little idea were there. 17 Gigabytes of junk on a 250GB SSD drive is a little over 6% of the drive! Add in the 12 or so Gigabytes of other junk floating around the Mac and I discover that in fact, rather than the tidy ship I thought I had, I’m wasting somewhere close to 10% of my disk in rubbish that can be removed.

But the new version of CleanMyMac goes a few steps further than just cleaning up files. It also allows cleaning up of installed applications, so that essentially you can reset an application to factory defaults – or, how it was when you first installed it – by using the Uninstaller functionality. The uninstaller properly uninstalls applications whereas often the standard Mac uninstallation routine of dragging to the trash can leave lots of properties files laying around, CleanMyMac will get rid of those too.

The Maintenance screen looks quite interesting too, since it re-indexes Mail databases – and I’ve found Apple Mail to be quite slow of late, I’m not sure whether this will fix it, but it looks like a good start. The Maintenance screens have a whole slew of other useful maintenance tasks – all of which can be done through the command line of course, but who wants to use the command line when there’s an app for it! If you don’t leave your Mac on 24/7 you’re not benefiting from a number of system cleanup routines that would run automatically. CleanMyMac3 offers the ability to run these maintenance scripts with a single click. There’s a bunch of other system maintenance items that can be done from here such as rebuilding the Spotlight index if it’s gone a bit wacky, verifying and repairing the disk(s) in your system and ‘Rebuilding Launch Services’.

The uninstaller section is perhaps one of the more useful sections of the applications. Apple has made the Mac very self contained when it comes to installing and uninstalling applications, generally you simply drag an app to the Applications folder and it installs (unless it plays around with system files at least) and to uninstall you usually just drag the application to the Trash Can. But this leaves configuration files and other data laying around on your drive – this might be what you want if you think you might re-install the app later, or you might need to completely reset the app. This usually involves opening up a terminal, finding the config files and removing them. A fairly easy procedure if you know what you’re doing and where to look. But the Uninstaller section of CleanMyMac3 lets you select an app and then hit the Application Reset filter button and instead of uninstalling the app you’re simply resetting it to the state it was when it was first installed. And looking at the screenshot, there’s a lot of files you’d need to find to properly reset the app too.

Finally, for this review – although there is a LOT more to CleanMyMac3 than we have room for in this review so we strongly suggest you check out the full list of features at http://macpaw.com/cleanmymac – we’ll look at the Extensions tab. Many applications in OSX can have extensions added to them, and if you’ve installed another application that provides an extension to a core OSX application, you may not even be aware that extensions have been installed. Some of these 3rd party extensions can cause slowdowns and instability and you may not even be aware of what’s causing it. Even just checking the Login Items can reveal startup processes that you might not even be using any more, or some that you just never use (like the iTunes Helper in my case).

Almost finally…. I just discovered another rather neat little feature of this version of CleanMyMac – the picture to the left tells the story 🙂 Clicking on the icon in the taskbar at the top brings up a nifty menu such as this, which gives you some useful system information at a glance.

In summary, my Mac is a fairly recent (well, by Mac standards – it’s probably a couple of years now) fresh install which I thought I looked after well. As it turns out, I have an extraordinary amount of extraneous rubbish laying around on my computer and some of it is taking up space, while other stuff could well be affecting the stability and even the speed of my mac.

Although you can do all of the things manually through the command line that CMM3 does, the beauty of CleanMyMac is that it speeds up the whole process for you. A few clicks and you’re done versus potentially hours of hunting around manually to find all the different files, making sure you don’t issue a command incorrectly and end up messing something up (though you still need some care when selecting what to delete with CMM) – the question you have to ask yourself is how much is my time worth? – because CMM3 will reduce the time required to do all those tasks.

I highly recommend CleanMyMac3, it’s a step ahead of the previous version and worth the upgrade.

Further Information

For further information on CleanMyMac3 and other MacPaw products, please visit https://macpaw.com/cleanmymac.

If you have experience with CleanMyMac and would like to share it – or any other comments, you can rate the app yourself using the stars below and of course leave a comment below

• 9/10
  Design - 9/10
• 10/10
  Features - 10/10
• 9/10
  Cost - 9/10
• 10/10
  Ease Of Use - 10/10
• 9/10
  Customer Support - 9/10
• 9/10
  Overall Value - 9/10

Summary

Positives: Easy to use, reclaim all that space, fast

Cleanmymac 3

Negatives: Hard to find any!

Trial Available: Yes, but quite limited Price: $39.99 USD for 1 mac, discounts apply for multiple mac licenses

Clean My Mac 3 Update