Simple tips to clean your Mac

Over time, your Mac is likely to accumulate a lot of atrocities. Old apps you no longer use, data you no longer need, a desktop full of icons (of which you only use four) ... you know what I mean. With so many people working from home lately, the problem has only gotten worse.

Now is a good time to put your Mac away and free up some space and possibly some CPU and RAM cycles. Here are some tips to make it easier for you to clean your Mac this spring.

Optimize storage

Open the storage management application either using Spotlight (command pane) or by clicking the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the menu bar, selecting About This Mac , and then clicking the Storage tab, Manage .

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The built-in memory management application is the best place to start cleaning your Mac.

Under the Recommendations tab, you will see a number of useful options such as: B. Save to iCloud and automatically empty the trash. The storage optimization solution removes things like old TV shows you've already seen and old email attachments when space is running out.

Take a look at your applications and documents

In the storage management application, click the Applications tab in the left column. Here you can view all installed apps and sort them by size. This makes it easy to remove apps that you haven't used in a long time.

Then click Documents on the left tab. There are several sections here, e.g. B. Large files and unsupported applications that are worth investigating. This is likely to display large library files (for applications like Lightroom or Final Cut Pro) that you may not want to edit. However, you may have large old files and documents, or apps that have stopped working on your version of macOS that you can safely delete.

Control your desktop

If your desktop is full of icons, then you should probably clean things up a bit. Right-click (two-finger tap on a trackpad) an empty area and choose Clean to keep things tidy or Clean to sort things out as well. Use the Use Batch feature to automatically stack files of the same type in a single icon. Just click that icon to open the batch. You can really tidy up your desk!

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These two commands are a quick way to get to work on a cluttered Mac desktop.

Try DaisyDisk

Seasoned users who really want to clean up their Mac storage can try a third-party app like DaisyDisk ($ 9.99) . It's an easy and neat way to see everything on your Mac or any attached storage device or hard drive. For example, you can dive into the mysterious "Other" category and help eliminate what you don't need.

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DaisyDisk shows and lists storage by folder and allows dragging to delete folders.

It may seem pointless to pay money for an application that only lets you erase things from your Mac's memory, but such hard drive scanners are very valuable. It can be really insightful to see exactly what is filling your Mac's SSD.

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