How to Clean Up Your Mac and Make It Faster in 2026

Every Mac slows down eventually. It might start with a spinning beach ball during a Zoom call, or a five-second pause when opening Finder. You check the storage bar and somehow, 80% of your drive is full — but you can't figure out with what.

I clean up my Mac about once a month, and I'm always surprised by how much junk accumulates. The good news: you can clean up your Mac and make it faster without reinstalling macOS or buying new hardware. The bad news: Apple doesn't give you great tools for the job.

Here are the exact steps I use, from quick diagnostics to a proper deep clean.

First: Figure Out What's Slowing You Down

Before deleting anything, spend two minutes diagnosing the real problem. A slow Mac usually comes down to one of three things:

1. Storage is nearly full. macOS needs 10–15% free disk space for swap files, caches, and system operations. Below that threshold, everything grinds.
2. Something is hogging CPU or RAM. A runaway process or too many browser tabs can bring even an M5 Mac to its knees.
3. Too many login items. Apps launching at startup compete for resources during the most critical boot window.

Check your storage:

1. Click the Apple menu → System Settings → General → Storage
2. Look at the color-coded bar — if it's mostly full, storage cleanup is your priority

Check what's using resources:

1. Open Activity Monitor (Spotlight: Cmd + Space, type "Activity Monitor")
2. Click the CPU tab and sort by % CPU — anything consistently above 100% is a problem
3. Check the Memory tab — if memory pressure is yellow or red, your Mac is swapping to disk

What to do: Kill obvious offenders by selecting them and clicking the X button. But this is a band-aid — the real fix is cleaning up what's accumulated over time.

Step 1: Clear System Caches and Logs

macOS and your apps generate gigabytes of cache and log files. They're designed to speed things up, but over time they bloat, become stale, and actually slow your system down.

How to do it manually:

1. Open Finder and press Cmd + Shift + G
2. Navigate to each of these folders one at a time:
   • ~/Library/Caches/ — App-level caches
   • /Library/Caches/ — System-level caches (requires admin password)
   • ~/Library/Logs/ — App log files
   • /Library/Logs/ — System log files
3. Select the contents of each folder (not the folder itself)
4. Move them to Trash

Important caveats:

• Don't delete the cache folders themselves — just their contents. Some apps expect the folder to exist.
• Don't touch anything in /System/Library/ — Apple protects these files with SIP for good reason.
• You may need to re-login to some apps after clearing their caches.
• Restart your Mac afterward to let macOS rebuild what it needs.

How much does this recover? On a Mac that hasn't been cleaned in a year, I typically see 2–8 GB from caches alone. You'd be surprised how much Chrome stashes away.

Step 2: Uninstall Apps Properly

Here's something most Mac users don't realize: dragging an app to the Trash only removes the .app bundle. It leaves behind preference files, caches, containers, launch agents, and sometimes kernel extensions scattered across your Library folders.

A single uninstalled app can leave behind 200 MB to 2 GB of hidden files. Multiply that by a dozen uninstalled apps and you've lost serious space.

How to do it manually:

After trashing an app, search these locations for leftover files (replace AppName with the app's name or developer):

• ~/Library/Application Support/AppName/
• ~/Library/Preferences/com.developer.appname.plist
• ~/Library/Caches/com.developer.appname/
• ~/Library/Containers/com.developer.appname/
• ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.developer.appname.savedState/
• /Library/LaunchAgents/ and /Library/LaunchDaemons/ (background services)

The problem: This is tedious and error-prone. Miss one file and it stays forever. Delete the wrong one and another app might break. Some apps use bundle identifiers that don't match their display name — good luck finding those manually.

Tip: Sensei's App Uninstaller shows you every associated file before removing anything — preference files, caches, containers, launch agents — so you can review before confirming. No leftover junk, no guesswork.

Step 3: Find and Remove Large Files

Your storage bar might show "System Data" or "Other" eating 50+ GB. That category is Apple's catch-all for everything it can't neatly categorize: old iOS backups, Time Machine snapshots, Xcode derived data, Docker images, and forgotten downloads.

How to do it manually:

1. Open Finder and press Cmd + F
2. Set the search to "This Mac"
3. Add the filter: File Size → is greater than → 1 GB
4. Sort by size and review what comes up

Common space hogs:

• ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/ — can reach 20+ GB for developers
• ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ — old iPhone/iPad backups
• ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/ — Docker disk images
• ~/Downloads/ — forgotten installers and zip files

Rule of thumb: Delete what you recognize. Be cautious with anything in /Library/ or /System/.

The faster approach: Finder's search works but requires you to set up filters manually each time. Sensei's Large Files Finder surfaces the biggest files on your drive sorted by size in one click — no Finder setup needed.

Step 4: Clean Up Browser Data

Browsers are some of the worst storage offenders. Chrome, in particular, caches aggressively — I've seen a single Chrome profile consume 8 GB. A year of browsing can easily accumulate 5–10 GB of cached data, stored history, and site data.

How to clear it:

• Safari: Safari → Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data → Remove All
• Chrome: Chrome → Settings → Privacy and Security → Clear Browsing Data → select Cached images and files → Clear Data
• Firefox: Firefox → Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data → Clear Data

Tip: For a deeper Chrome clean, check ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/ — Chrome stores profile data here that isn't cleared by the in-app option. Old browser profiles you no longer use can be several gigabytes each.

Step 5: Manage Login Items and Launch Agents

Every app that starts at login adds seconds to your boot time and consumes RAM throughout the day. After a few years of installing apps, you might have 15–20 items launching silently — and most of them you don't need.

How to do it manually:

1. Open System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions
2. Under Open at Login, remove anything you don't need running at startup
3. Scroll down to Allow in the Background and disable unused helpers

The hidden layer: This only shows you part of the picture. Many apps install Launch Agents and Launch Daemons — background services that run regardless of whether you've opened the app. These hide in:

• ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/

You can inspect these .plist files to see what they do, but modifying them incorrectly can cause issues. Pay special attention to items from apps you've already uninstalled — their background helpers often survive deletion.

Step 6: Empty the Trash and Check Mail Attachments

I know — it sounds obvious. But your Trash might be holding 10+ GB of files you deleted weeks ago. No shame in checking.

Quick actions:

1. Right-click the Trash icon → Empty Trash (or press Cmd + Shift + Delete)
2. Check Mail attachments at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads/ — years of email attachments can quietly consume several gigabytes

Step 7: Run First Aid on Your Disk

This won't free up space, but it can fix filesystem corruption that causes slowdowns and app crashes.

How to do it:

1. Open Disk Utility (Spotlight: Cmd + Space, type "Disk Utility")
2. Select your startup volume in the sidebar
3. Click First Aid and let it run

If errors persist: Boot into Recovery Mode — press and hold the power button on Apple Silicon Macs, or hold Cmd + R on Intel Macs — and run First Aid from there.

Tip: If First Aid finds recurring errors, it may indicate a drive issue. Sensei's S.M.A.R.T. monitoring can give you an early warning on drive health before data loss happens.

The Faster Way: Let Sensei Handle It

Everything above works — but honestly, it takes an afternoon, requires navigating hidden Library folders, and you're always one wrong deletion away from breaking something.

Sensei automates the entire process in a single scan. Here's how it maps to the manual steps:

How much does it find? In our testing on a two-year-old MacBook Air, Sensei identified 22.7 GB of recoverable space — compared to 18.4 GB found by MacCleaner Pro on the same machine.

Beyond cleaning, Sensei also monitors your Mac's health in real time: CPU and GPU usage, memory pressure, thermals, fan speeds, battery health, and drive S.M.A.R.T. status — all from your menu bar. It runs quietly in the background with practically zero system impact.

Pricing: $29/year or $59 for a lifetime license (up to 3 Macs). Both include a 7-day free trial and 14-day money-back guarantee.

Download Sensei and run your first scan — it takes about a minute.

Keep Your Mac Clean Going Forward

Cleaning once makes a difference. Staying clean makes it permanent. These are the habits I've found actually stick:

• Empty the Trash weekly. A full Trash can hold dozens of gigabytes you think you already freed.
• Delete DMGs after installing apps. Don't let disk images pile up in Downloads.
• Review login items every few months. New apps love adding themselves to startup without asking.
• Restart your Mac weekly. This clears temporary files and resets memory pressure.
• Keep at least 15–20% of your disk free. macOS needs breathing room for swap, caches, and system updates. Performance degrades noticeably below this threshold.

Tip: Sensei's scheduled scans can handle most of this automatically — set it and forget it.

Conclusion

A clean Mac is a fast Mac. The manual methods in this guide will get you there, but they take time and require careful navigation of hidden system folders. If you'd rather spend a minute instead of an afternoon, Sensei handles the entire process — from junk removal to storage analysis to ongoing monitoring.

Either way, your Mac deserves better than a full disk and 20 forgotten login items.

Related guides: Why Is My Mac So Slow? 12 Fixes That Work and Maximize Mac Battery Life. For comprehensive system monitoring, explore Sensei.