Mac & iPhone Utilities

Reclaiming storage: start with what is actually taking the space

The usual instinct when a disk fills up is to delete downloads and empty the trash, which almost never recovers the amount people expect. The space is usually in three places: duplicate copies of the same photos and files, a Photos library that grew silently, and the opaque bucket macOS labels System Data or Other.

DiskSpace answers the first question - what is actually large - by drawing the disk rather than listing it, so a forgotten 40 GB folder is obvious at a glance. CleanTwin handles the second: it compares files by content hash and by visual similarity, so it catches both exact copies and the near-identical burst shots and resized re-saves that a filename comparison misses.

Background reading, in the order most people need it: what to delete when the startup disk is full, what Other storage is and what System Data is, then finding duplicate files by checksum and finding duplicate photos on a Mac. On iPhone, the common trap is storage still being full after deleting photos, and iCloud needs its own careful approach.

Knowing what your Mac and your network are doing

The second group answers "why is this slow, hot, or loud" - questions that are usually guessed at rather than measured.

• System Status Monitor and Memory Monitor put live CPU, memory, network and battery figures in the menu bar. Most "my Mac is slow" cases resolve into one of a few named culprits - see what kernel_task is, why Chrome uses so much RAM, diagnosing a Mac running hot and what drains the battery. If you are sizing a new machine, how much RAM a Mac needs is the more useful question than what the monitor shows today, and CPU load does not mean what most people assume.
• Wi-Fi Analyzer shows signal strength, connected devices and channel congestion, which is what actually explains an evening slowdown - why Wi-Fi is slow at night, channel overlap, 2.4 vs 5 GHz, and who is on your network.
• App Firewall shows which apps are opening outbound connections and lets you block the ones that should not be. See whether macOS needs a firewall, which Mac apps phone home and what is uploading in the background.

The single-purpose ones

The rest of the category exists because each solves one specific annoyance properly rather than being part of a suite.

FileLister turns a folder into a searchable, exportable catalogue with 60+ metadata fields - the tool for cataloguing an external drive before you unplug it or getting a folder into a spreadsheet. Sonic Water Eject pulses a tone to clear a speaker after water gets into an iPhone or into AirPods and an Apple Watch. Earthquake Monitor maps live seismic activity worldwide - see early warning versus detection. GlowKeys draws every keystroke on screen while you record a screencast. And Anti Pest plays ultrasonic tones, about which we published an honest assessment rather than a sales pitch.