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macOS is remarkably good at looking after itself. Anyone who's watched a Windows install, slow to a crawl over the years, knows exactly how well-tuned it is by comparison. But the operating system and the apps we install on our Macs do have one irritating flaw. They're not brilliant at tidying up after themselves. And long forgotten directories, the remnants of long since uninstalled apps, cache and log files, often end up taking a stupid amount of space up on our SSDs. The good news is, you don't need to pay a subscription to find out where your storage went. Welcome along to the channel, my friends. My name is Andy Hutchinson. I'm a Gen-X, British slash Australian technology journalist from back in the day, and a lifelong Apple fanboy. This is the first video on my new channel, Mostly Mac, where I'll be applying the same ruthless, shill-free scrutiny to gear, software, and the endless bullshit of the tech industry that I've been giving the photography world for years. If you enjoy spin-free analysis with zero sponsors or affiliate links, do consider subscribing. Like many of us, my go-to Mac cleaning app for many, many years was CleanMyMac. But the subscription cost and ludicrously expensive single-purchase price of CleanMyMac had me looking for alternatives. I still have an old version installed, but I think I'm going to be liberating its drive space very soon. And that's because I read about an excellent cleaner that claimed to be just as efficient in sweeping away the remnant detritus from a heavily used operating system. And I decided to test it to see if it could replace CleanMyMac. The app in question is called Mole. And you should know that there are two versions of this app. An open-source version that is completely free and runs in your Mac's terminal, and a pay-for version that costs $19, single purchase, and runs as a regular Mac app using a graphical interface. I'm a big fan of Homebrew, and since I'm trying to save some money, aren't we all? I installed the open-source version that I found on GitHub. But if you'd rather have a regular app and you don't think 19 bucks is an unreasonable fee for a useful system maintenance app, then test that instead. I will link to both versions in the description. And while I'm reviewing the free open-source version that runs in a terminal, it's worth pointing out that the pay-for version has extra stuff, such as a daisy-disk style storage page, a cool Mac health dashboard, and an iStat menu-style info display that sits in the menu bar. That being said, let's take a look at it in action. To start Mole in the terminal, you simply type mole, and you'll then see five options: Clean, Uninstall, Optimize, Analyze, and Status. The first option, Clean, is an incredibly comprehensive sweep of the back alleys and hidden corners of macOS, looking for all those redundant, orphan, non-essential, and leftover files that pile up over time. On my M2 MacBook Pro, a full clean took about 9 minutes and netted me nearly 13 gigabytes of space I could reclaim. Obviously, the amount of space you reclaim will depend on how often you run the app, but you can expect to see substantially more space cleaned if it's the first time you've used it. On my clean, runs through the User Essentials category, which are stuff like app caches, logs, and trash, freed up about 8 gigs of space. Developer tools was 2.1 gigs of crap, and the browser suite liberated 1.5 gigs. Unless you've just run out of space and need to urgently free up some room, then you only need to run that big, full sweep about once a month. But the Optimize option, which flushes caches and memory as well, is worth running on a more regular basis, I recommend weekly. The Uninstall option analyzes every app on your Mac and presents them in a list, ordered by default by age, with the oldest app sitting at the top. Like me, you may be surprised to find several ancient apps sitting there you completely forgotten about. And the beauty of using Mole to uninstall those apps is that it cleans up all of the files and directories that would otherwise get left behind if you were just to drag the app to the trash can. The Analyze option runs a scan on your main drive and shows you what's taking up all that valuable space. This is usually an eye-opener the first time you use it and find out just how much space your Photos directory is taking up. And lastly, the Status option gives you a neat overview of your Mac and its various metrics, including CPU, memory, disk, power, network, and processes. One of the best ways of gauging the quality of an open-source app like this is to see how many stars it's been awarded by users on GitHub. And as I record this video, that number for this app stands over 60,000. That level of satisfaction is a huge confidence boost when you're entrusting an app to dig away at the vital internal structures of your Mac. I've been running Mole on my 2019 Intel iMac and my 2023 M2 MacBook Pro for about 6 months now, and it has run flawlessly on every occasion that I've triggered a cleanup. I'm always surprised when I fire it up and find I've got about 15 gigs of redundant crap sitting there, occupying valuable space on my Mac's internal SSD. If you want to use the free version, then the only real downside to this app is that it runs in a terminal and you have to do a little bit of terminal-based installation. But it's a small price to pay for such an effective app. It lacks the bells and whistles of CleanMyMac, but so what? Most of what MacPaw bolted on over the years, I never touched anyway. I only ever wanted the one thing this app does. If you're looking for an app to sweep away the digital dust from your Mac, and you don't fancy ponying up for yet another bloody subscription, then Mole comes highly recommended. And that will do us for this, my very first review on my new Apple-only channel. Have you tried Mole, or are you sticking by the old faithful CleanMyMac? Do let me know in the comment section below. If you enjoyed this video, then do please give it a like. And if you got value from it, consider subscribing to my new channel for more, shill-free Mac software reviews and guides. Till the next time, guys, ta-ta.
