A public service announcement for all Mac users!

As Mac owners and users, we all get excited about the latest Mac or how fast the newest Apple silicon is. We get excited by Thunderbolt 5 and data transfer speeds. We obsess about how many nits of brightness our new Mac has.

But us Mac owners often overlook the one basic that should never be overlooked, and that is to look after our Macs.

Certainly, when I first bought a Mac, I’d heard they were indestructible and that you’d never get a virus. Now, both of those are true – to a point. Macs, apart from being gorgeous, are also workhorses that will last you for years. And all they ask for is a tiny bit of TLC.

And no, if you were wondering, over all the years that I’ve used a Mac, I haven’t had a virus or malware – but times are changing and I’m not going to be caught out.

The nature of what I do means I’m online an awful lot. And in the line of work I do, it means I get emails from all sorts of sources, with all sorts of links and attachments.

I’m pretty cautious – in fact, now more so than ever. I like to think I’m not stupid enough to click on anything, but as you know, it only takes that one time. That one wrong click can take you down a road from which it’s hard to recover.

Looking after my Mac

Hopefully, when you read my stories, you’ll know that I come at tech from a very average user’s point of view. I have no degree in computers. I couldn’t build a PC for love nor money.

All that said, I do sit working on a Mac pretty much every day, so I do come across problems that need solving or at least finding practical workarounds. I look for easy-to-use solutions that’ll keep my Mac working perfectly.

It was that perfectionist in me that first brought me to CleanMyMac. Now, I’ve heard the doubters about it, but all I can tell you is that it does the job it sets out to do quietly and efficiently without you having to have an honours degree in computer science!

Initially, I bought it to use on my lovely old 2015 Intel iMac. I think I must have been using that iMac for 3 or 4 trouble-free years before I noticed that it was starting to slow down dramatically. I’d always looked after that Mac – back in those days it was my only Mac. I used it in my design business, mainly using InDesign and Photoshop.

It was as my Photoshop files started to get larger and more complex that the iMac started to struggle. I did some reading online, trying to find solutions and came across CleanMyMac. I’d never heard of it back then, but it sounded like the sort of thing I was after. Put it this way, I thought it was worth giving it a go before springing for a new Mac.

I bought it purely as a way of cleaning up the hard drive and get rid of some background junk. I naively thought that was all it did! I seem to remember the first time I ran it that it got rid of about 50GB of rubbish. Don’t forget that iMac had only ever been used by me, and yet still I had managed to accumulate all that junk. This stuff creeps up on you.

Immediately, that old Intel iMac started to run more like its old self, and from that day on, I was sold on CleanMyMac. It helped me to eek a few more years out of it before I bought my first Apple silicon Mac – the MacBook Pro I’m writing this on today.

I’m not trying to ram it down your throats – that’s not my style, it’s rather I’m just sharing a good news story with you. It does what it says on the tin and gives your machine that bit of love I was talking about earlier.

While there may be other similar solutions out there, if something’s working, why go looking for an alternative, right?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

So yes, since then, every one I’ve bought to review or use, I’ve bought a licence for CleanMyMac and routinely installed it from day one. I have no fixed routine as to how often I run it – it’s just peace of mind knowing that it’s sitting in my menu bar if a problem crops up. Other times, it will suddenly cross my mind to run it for the heck of it, just to check all’s well. We all get those days when we think our Macs are chugging a bit – those are the days I inevitably open it up and run it.

Changing times

Last year, something happened that nearly ruined everything.

As I mentioned earlier, I get a lot of emails from all sorts of people, places and companies. Last year, I was approached by what I thought was a sponsor. Apparently, Fiji Water wanted to sponsor a video!

Yes, yes, I know now how daft I was to think that a household company of that size would come directly to a YouTube channel that at the time had under 10,000 subs. What can I say except that I was wet behind the ears in this game, and that mistake won’t happen again. You live and you learn.

My main mistake that day was to click a link and download what I thought was a contract. It was about then that the penny dropped – I suddenly thought, what the hell have I just done? I don’t know what made me think of but I went to CleanMyMac. I scrambled around and thankfully found a whole load of tools that I thought might help.

The first one I went to run was the Malware tool, which found something suspicious that I would never have found. It immediately got rid of it – and saved the day.

So you see, this isn’t some pitch. I honestly use it and believe in it. You may have your reasons for not wanting to install it, but if you are an average user like me, and you haven’t yet tried it, all I can say is do yourself a favour. You even get a 7-day free trial period too.

Love your Mac

Yes, Macs are pretty indestructible, but you shouldn’t let that belief lead to laziness.

We’re all open to hacks or being attacked anytime we are online. Yeah, I may be more vulnerable than some because of what I do, but never overlook the fact that we are all at risk. And come the day you click on that link that you quickly realise that you shouldn’t have, that will be the day that you’ll be glad to have CleanMyMac up and running.

I speak from experience.

Since those early days, though, CleanMyMac has become so much more than just a tool that’ll simply clean junk from your Mac. Hitting the big round run button now runs through a checklist that includes Cleanup, Protection, Performance, Updates and Duplicates.

Having just run it on my M1 Max MacBook, it’s found 18.5GB of junk, an update that needs to be installed and two performance tasks that need to be run. And it did all that while I was working and writing this story. That is what I love about it. It’s powerful yet simple.

One by one

Although you can simply hit the one-and-done Smart Care button, you can equally choose which individual tasks you want to run.

If your computer feels slow, you may just want to run the Performance or Cleanup modules. If, like in my case, you’re worried about some possible Malware or virus, then you can quickly run the Protection module.

There are also a couple of other tools I love too – with simplicity being the USP here. You can click on now click on a new button – My Clutter, which found some stuff I had no idea was hidden on my Mac.

I used to use Premiere Pro, and it seems there were about 74GB of old rendered files that I don’t need. How they got there in the first place, I have no idea, but they’ve been deleted now.

And then there is Space Lens, which takes a granular look-see at what is taking up the most disk space on your Mac. Space Lens is new and interesting. Although it’s looking deep inside your Mac, it has this friendly bubbly design that belies the heavy hitting it’s doing. At a glance, you can spot the biggest space-hogging files and quickly build a visual map of what’s taking up disk space.

The reason that the Protection function worked so well for me was that it extends its reach to DMG disk images, email attachments, archives, and even my external Thunderbolt 5 drives. You get to choose how deep you want to scan by using the quick, blanched or deep levels.

And being a lover of cool tech, I also love the way you can just take a quick look at the overall health of your Mac at any time. You can see what space you have left available on your hard drive, the temperature of the CPU, what pressure the memory is under and even what external drives you have connected. Although it’s not CleanMyMac’s main reason for being, it’s a bloody handy little bonus ball.

Be smart

I didn’t expect to sit down and write this story today. I had something else in mind altogether, which will now be next week’s piece. I don’t think I’ve ever written a story before about one app.

It’s not necessarily the sexiest or coolest thing to write about, I know, but it is hugely important. CleanMyMac most days just sits there minding its own beeswax. But come that day, you need it, whether to freshen up your Mac or even save it, that’s the day you’ll be glad it’s there too.

Learn from my mistakes. Look after your Mac and it’ll pay you back by the bucket load.

Next week, I’ll be writing about my top bits of tech I pack for making content on the fly.