SSDs are great—they’re fast, durable, and reliable—but they’re also expensive, which results in many of us not having as much storage built into our Macs as we’d like. Particularly for those who watch videos in iTunes or take a lot of photos, it’s all too easy to run out of space on your Mac’s internal drive.
MacPaw’s CleanMyMac X is a great solution for those who don’t mind its $35 price tag. This utility can help you identify and remove unnecessary data to free up space. It can ferret out forgotten downloads, old videos, mammoth folders, bloated caches, outdated iOS updates and backups, copies of iOS apps, and more. It also boasts other features that can improve performance, protect your Mac from malware, and keep your apps up to date.
But if you want to go the belt-and-suspenders route, you can use Apple’s built-in tool for cleaning house: Storage Management.
Apple hid Storage Management inside the System Information app, but there’s a shortcut for accessing it. Choose Apple > About This Mac, click the Storage button, and then click Manage… but wait! Before you click Manage, look at the About This Mac window’s Storage view.
On your Mac, choose Apple menu System Preferences, then click Users & Groups. Click the lock icon to unlock it. Enter an administrator name and password. Select the user or group you want to delete, then click the Remove button (looks like a minus sign) below the list of users. 'Disabling paging/swap takes the cake among these ‘recommendations’. Mac app store access. If you want processes to crash, the system to force you to close applications or to experience slowdowns – be my guest.' I've had VM swap disabled on my late-2012 Mac Mini for at least a year now (probably longer). It has 10gb of RAM and it NEVER crashes.
How To Delete Unwanted Apps On Macbook
To save more space, you must delete unnecessary data from within the app itself. If your Mac’s drive is filling up—if it has less than 10 percent free space—consider using the Storage Management tools to search out and delete files that are wasting space. To be safe, make a backup first! Good luck with your housekeeping. Most applications are very small and will not free up much space. Download from the Internet OmniDiskSweeper and Grand Perspective (both free) and open them. They will show all of your files and the respective sizes. Transfer to an external HDD the files you do not want on your Mac or delete them. Do not forget to empty trash.
Hover over each colored bar to see how much space is taken up by a particular type of data. The white space at the end of the bar shows space that’s still available. You can’t do much here, but the view gives you a quick overview of your usage.
When you click Manage, System Information launches, and the Storage Management window appears. (You can also open System Information manually and choose Window > Storage Management.) In the sidebar at the left, ignore Recommendations and look at the rest of the categories, particularly Applications, Documents, and iOS Files. The specific categories will vary a bit between Macs, depending on what apps you use, but they correspond to the colored bars you saw in the About This Mac window’s Storage view.
Applications
The Applications category lists your apps and is sorted by size by default. But try clicking the column header for Kind and scrolling down. You can probably trash most apps tagged as Duplicates or Older Versions. Similarly, click the Last Accessed column header to see which apps you haven’t launched in years. Many of them can probably go. Plus, you can redownload anything tagged as coming from the App Store, so you can toss those apps to save space.
While getting rid of applications you don’t need (or are redundant or very old) isn’t a bad idea how much space you are going to recover is not really going to be that significant. But it’s good housekeeping nonetheless.
Documents
In Documents, you’ll see three buttons: Large Files, Downloads, and File Browser. Large Files focuses on files over 50 MB in size, Downloads displays the contents of your Downloads folder (much of which you likely don’t need and people seem to never clean this up), and File Browser gives you a column view that’s sorted by file size and shows sizes next to each item. It’s great for trawling through your drive to see what’s consuming all that space.
In any of these views other than File Browser, hover over any item to see an X button for deleting the file and a magnifying glass button that reveals the file in the Finder. To delete multiple files at once, Command-click or Shift-click to select them and then press the Delete key to remove them all at once. Storage Management gives you the combined size of all the selected files and warns you before deleting the files, so you can use this technique to preview how much space a multi-file deletion will save.
In File Browser, select one or more files and either drag them to the Trash icon in the Dock, or press Command-Delete on the keyboard.
iOS Files
If you’ve used iTunes to manage iOS devices in the past, pay special attention to the iOS Files category. Newton mail app mac. This may be the mother-load (other than movies/tv shows). It shows any device backups and software updates that are stored on your Mac’s drive. If you still use iTunes to back up your device, it’s worth keeping the latest backup of devices you still use, but many people have obsolete backups and unnecessary updates kicking around. Have a gander at the names of the devices and if you don’t own them anymore and haven’t for years, get rid of them. This has big potential for recovering a lot of space.
Other
As noted before, the rest of the categories here may vary depending on what apps you use. With Books and iTunes, you can remove content that you’ve purchased, since you can download it again. One thing you might also employ is the ability for you to delete already watched movies and TV shows: Open up iTunes and go to Preferences > Advanced and check the box “Automatically delete watched movies and TV shows.” If you want to watch them again then download when you need them.
With Mail and Photos, Storage Management merely tells you how much space the app’s data occupies and lets you enable space optimization (downloading only recent attachments for Mail, and keeping only optimized photos on the Mac). To save more space, you must delete unnecessary data from within the app itself.
If your Mac’s drive is filling up—if it has less than 10 percent free space—consider using the Storage Management tools to search out and delete files that are wasting space. To be safe, make a backup first!
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Good luck with your housekeeping. Your Mac will be happier for it.
Delete Unnecessary Apps On Macbook Pro
Apple unveils a new MacBook Air during an Apple launch event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Oct. 30, 2018 in New York City. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Removing programs from a Macintosh can be very easy. In many cases, all you have to do is drag the application's icon to the Trash. Sometimes, though, applications store the files they need to run in other locations on your computer's hard drive, and finding them can take some detective work. If you are used to the uninstall option in Windows, you have a little culture shock — macOS does not have this feature built in.
Why would you want to uninstall a program? For the same reason you occasionally tidy your office or clean your garage. Clutter breeds inefficiency. Applications take up space on your hard disk and can slow your computer. Also, a new version of a program may not work correctly unless you get rid of the old one [source: Ritchie].
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Most of the time, uninstalling is this simple:
How To Delete Useless Apps On Mac
When files for the application you want to delete are all stored in one location, dragging the icon to the Trash will take care of most of the work. In Mac talk, apps like this are 'bundled.' To see the files in an application's bundle, click on its icon while holding down the Control key. You should see an option that says, 'show package contents.' Uninstalling applications downloaded from the Mac App Store is even easier — just delete the application from the Applications Folder and its accompanying folder in UserLibraryContainers [source: Tanous].
For some other programs, removal is more complicated. How to change email address on mail app mac. When installed, these programs create files in several locations, often in the System Folder. The first step in removing them is to check the program's documentation to see if there is an uninstall utility. If your program has an uninstall utility associated with it, it may have been installed with the program or included on the disk that came with it. If you downloaded a disk image to install the software, sometimes you'll find an uninstaller there. Running an uninstall utility can make removing a program much easier.
You should be aware that removing an unbundled program by moving it into the Trash can leave behind orphan files on your computer. Preferencefiles are usually small and you might want to ignore them if you're just trying to free up disk space. Background files or support files can be larger, especially for multimedia programs like GarageBand [source: MacRumors]. These files are likely to reside in Library folders in your hard drive or Home folder. They will usually be labeled with the name of the program, like Office or Acrobat, or the developer, such as Microsoft or Adobe. You can search for the relevant names using Spotlight, which is included with the Mac OS. Drag the files you find to the trash to get rid of them [source: Tanous]. .
Check out the next page for tips to make your uninstallation go even more smoothly.
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If searching through obscure corners of your computer for what could be hundreds of files sounds like something a machine could do better than you, you're right. There are plenty of software programs that do just that. They're usually your best bet for really cleaning an app off your Mac, and some of them are free. Popular examples include AppTrap, Appcleaner, and AppZapper.
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Some of the files that a program might create on your hard disk are invisible. It may be tempting, especially for neat freaks, to find and delete these files. But some files are deliberately hidden because they are essential to the computer's operating system. Deleting the wrong file could land you in deep trouble [source: Landau]. The best advice is not to go where even experienced techies fear to tread. Uninstall utilities can search out and destroy these files, but doing so on your own invites trouble.
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Another important thing to do is empty your Trash when you're finished uninstalling. Moving a program's icon to the Trash doesn't actually remove the files from your hard disk or clear up any space. Only when you empty the Trash is the application really gone.
Here are some other important tips:
Removing software from your Mac is a lot less of a hassle than cleaning your office or garage. But clearing away computer clutter and making space on your hard disk can be just as satisfying.
Can't Delete App On Mac
Originally Published: Aug 8, 2011
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