The Ultimate Guide to Cleaning Your Mac in 2026

To clean a Mac, work from the biggest wins to the smallest: look at what is using the disk, empty the Trash, clear out the Downloads folder, remove apps you no longer use, then deal with caches, old device backups and developer data. Everything below can be done by hand in Finder and System Settings on macOS 13 and later. Make a Time Machine backup first if you have a backup disk, so that a mistake can be undone.

1. See what is using the space

1. Open System Settings, then General, then Storage.
2. Wait for the coloured bar to finish calculating. It can take a minute or two.
3. Read the list of categories under the bar, such as Applications, Documents, Photos and System Data. Click the info button beside a category to see what is inside it.
4. Look at the recommendations above the list. Empty Trash Automatically removes items that have been in the Trash for 30 days.

This tells you where to spend your time. If Documents is the largest category, caches are not your problem.

2. Empty the Trash and clear Downloads

1. Open the Trash from the Dock and check nothing in it is needed.
2. Choose Finder, then Empty Trash.
3. Open the Downloads folder and switch to list view.
4. Click the Size column heading to sort the biggest files to the top. Installers ending in .dmg or .pkg can go once the app is installed.
5. Sort by Date Added and review anything you have not touched for months.

3. Remove apps you no longer use

1. Open the Applications folder in Finder and sort by Size.
2. If an app came with its own uninstaller, use that.
3. Otherwise drag the app to the Trash.

Dragging an app to the Trash leaves its support files behind in your Library folder. Our guide on how to completely uninstall apps on Mac shows where to find them.

4. Clear caches with care

Caches are copies that apps keep so they can load things again without fetching them. Apps rebuild them when needed, so removing them is generally safe, but the space often fills again over time.

1. Quit the apps whose caches you want to clear.
2. In Finder choose Go, then Go to Folder, and enter ~/Library/Caches.
3. Open the folders for apps you recognise and move their contents to the Trash. Leave anything you do not recognise alone.
4. Restart the Mac, check your apps still work, then empty the Trash.

Browsers have their own menus for this. See how to clear the browser cache on a Mac.

5. Check device backups and developer data

• iPhone and iPad backups: if you have backed up a device to this Mac, an iOS Files category appears in Storage. Click its info button to remove backups of devices you no longer own.
• Xcode: build data in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData can be deleted. Xcode recreates it on the next build. More in our Xcode storage guide.
• Mail: downloaded attachments can add up over years of email. Review them before removing anything.

What MacPrune does about it

MacPrune v2.0 gathers these steps into one app. Its Disk page shows a map where every folder is a tile sized by the space it takes, which is for looking only. The Clean page runs one scan and sorts the results into three groups:

• Safe to clean: user caches, browser caches, the Trash, system logs, Xcode data and package manager caches.
• Review before cleaning: large files, downloads older than 90 days, duplicate downloads and mail attachments.
• Handle with care: iOS backups and Docker data.

There are also pages for Large Files and for Apps, which uninstalls an app together with its related files. Whatever you choose is moved to the Trash after a confirmation, and the space is freed when the Trash is emptied.

Keep it clean

Repeat the Storage check every month or two. The basic version of MacPrune is free and scans everything, and you can download it here. If the disk still looks full afterwards, read Mac storage full but nothing to delete.