MacKeeper 3.21.4
OS X maintenance tool
MacKeeper is a suite of utilities, giving you a hub of tools to clean and optimize your Mac.
PROS
- Ton of tools
- Very quickly reveals wasted space on your Mac
- Easy to use
- Slick interface
- Good duplicate finder
CONS
- Nags you to buy theft protection
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MacKeeper is a suite of utilities, giving you a hub of tools to clean and optimize your Mac.
Good looking multipurpose app
Being one of the most advertized Mac products on the web, you've probably heard of MacKeeper. Its marketing actually makes it harder to trust, which is a shame as it has a range of tools that actually work, with an attractive and simple interface. There are some bad points too, which we'll come to.
MacKeeper's opening feature is called 'Find & Fix'. This is essentially a total scan of your Mac, which will find all the Cleaning, Security, and Performance 'issues' with your system, and then offer to fix them. Cleaning is a neat and quick way to clear some space on your hard drive. Performance is all about keeping your apps up to date - most apps do this themselves, but MacKeeper is a good one-stop-shop, especially if you have lots of apps installed. The Security side has two elements, an Anti Theft part, which is included, and Internet Security, which requires additional installation.
Whether or not Internet Security is good or not, I was not impressed at a prompt to install it. Security apps on OS X are really not necessary for most users. Claiming that you should install it unless you have another security app installed is a little pushy. MacKeeper will highlight your lack of a security app as a 'serious' threat, which is an exaggeration.
The Anti-Theft, on the other hand, is quite neat. Regardless of whether or not your have your Mac's location services on, if it's stolen, simply sign into your Kromtech account (free, and necessary to use MacKeeper) from any browser and click 'Report Stolen Computer.' As soon as your Mac is connected to the internet, it will report its location to Kromtech and take a snapshot of whoever's in front of it using the webcam.
Not perfect, but genuinely useful
There are 16 tools in total - if you haven't cleaned your Mac for a while the Duplicates Finder is quite useful. Disk Usage lets you see which folders and places are using the most space, which again can help you free up disk space.
Taken by themselves, MacKeeper's tools are nothing special, but having them all together is pretty useful. I'd like to see less pushy security features - it's not a bad thing to have, but it's misleading to say it's dangerous not to.
16 tools to keep your mac running smoothly
If you're looking for an all-in-one solution to keeping your Mac clean, MacKeeper is a pretty good option. It's a great way to find more space, and the anti-theft feature is also good.
