Clean up YOUR MAC

The deep clean your Mac has been waiting for

Cleaning. Decluttering. Tidying. In the real world, these things can be an irritant, but you at least have the advantage of

knowing when to do them. (Hint: if you can’t get into a room due to piles of boxes, or can draw in the dust atop your surfaces, it’s time.) In the world of computing, however, clutter can be largely invisible.

Over the years, digital cruft builds up as you install new apps, moving your Mac further away from its pristine factory-fresh state. And as you gradually fill its drive with new documents, only Finder’s status bar, assuming you have it turned on, provides any real indication as to the current state of play regarding available storage. But, sooner or later, you’ll get a dreaded warning that your Mac’s running low on free space.

We’ve all been there – even, in the case of one MacFormat writer, that one time a Mac didn’t even have enough space to take a new screenshot. And sometimes there are other reasons why you may need to clean up your Mac – for example, when you have a system clash that’s hard to pin down, making your Mac behave in a strange manner.

The idea behind this feature is to outline different ways you can declutter a Mac: finding and removing documents and apps you no longer need; shifting data to the cloud; and a ‘start from scratch’ approach when things have already gone horribly wrong. And because many of you will be using iPads and iPhones too, we’ll also spend a little time explaining how to keep those devices in tip-top condition.

After all, we should be far from the days when you only have room for that single snap left at an all-important event. That was understandable in a world of film; not so much when devices start out with many gigabytes of storage.