The Mac apps worth installing first on a new machine

The short version: install Rectangle, AppCleaner, Stats and Maccy, all free, and use the Mac for a month before paying for anything. Most people who follow that never buy a utility subscription, and nothing in their workflow is missing.

That is not a case against paid software. It is a case against buying it on day one, when the thing you are actually feeling is that a new machine is unfamiliar rather than that it is missing a feature.

The four free ones to install first

• Rectangle — window management. macOS still has no proper keyboard-driven window snapping, and this is the gap every Mac user eventually notices. Rectangle fills it, free and open source. Half-screen, quarter-screen, next display, all on shortcuts you will have memorised by Thursday.
• AppCleaner — uninstalling. Dragging an app to the Trash leaves its preference files, caches, and sometimes a background agent that still launches at login. AppCleaner finds those and removes them with the app. Free, and it is the entire useful half of what paid cleaners charge for.
• Stats — a menu bar readout of CPU, memory, disk, network and temperature. Free and open source. Mostly useful for answering "why is the fan on", which on a Mac is otherwise a guessing game.
• Maccy — clipboard history. Small, free, and one of those things that is invisible until you have had it for a week and then switching to a machine without it feels broken.

That is window management, clean uninstalls, system visibility and clipboard history — which is, in practice, the list of reasons people go looking for Mac utilities in the first place.

Disk cleaners, and the thing they do not tell you

CleanMyMac is the best-known paid utility on the platform and the one most new Mac owners end up considering. It is $39.95 a year standalone, or included in Setapp at $9.99 a month.

What it genuinely does well is visibility. The breakdown of where your storage went — which caches, which application support folders, which forgotten downloads — is clearer than anything macOS gives you, and for someone who does not want to go digging through ~/Library in a terminal, that is worth something.

The part to be sceptical about is the headline number. A cleaner that reports it has "found 14 GB" is mostly counting caches, and caches are not lost space — macOS reclaims them under pressure, and the applications that own them will simply rebuild them, which costs you the time and the disk writes. Deleting a browser cache looks like freeing 3 GB and is really borrowing 3 GB back from next week.

The space that genuinely is recoverable is the stuff nothing will reclaim on its own: old iOS device backups, Xcode's simulator runtimes and derived data, Docker images, forgotten disk images in Downloads. All of that is findable without a paid tool, and a cleaner is a convenience for locating it rather than a capability you lack.

Setapp: the maths, honestly

Setapp is $9.99 a month for one Mac, $12.49 with iOS devices, $14.99 for the four-Mac tier. For that you get a library of around 240 apps including CleanMyMac, and the pitch is obvious: CleanMyMac alone is $39.95 a year, so four months of Setapp costs about the same and includes everything else.

That maths works if you use several of the apps. The pattern we keep seeing is that people sign up for two — usually a cleaner and one more — and then pay $120 a year for two apps they could have bought outright for less. Setapp is a good deal for the person who genuinely rotates through a handful of tools, and a bad one for the person who subscribes because the library is impressive.

A fair test before subscribing: write down the apps you would actually open in a normal week. If the list is fewer than four, buy them individually. If it is more, Setapp is cheaper and simpler, and the cancel-anytime terms mean the downside is one month's fee.

Window management is the one place paid wins

Rectangle is free and good. BetterTouchTool and Moom-style tools are paid and better, and this is the category where the gap is real rather than marketing. If you run an ultrawide display, or you want window layouts that restore when you reconnect a monitor, or you want gestures bound to arbitrary actions, the paid tools do things Rectangle does not attempt.

It is also the category where the investment compounds, because the shortcuts become muscle memory and then they are worth whatever they cost. If you are going to pay for one utility, this is the one with the best case.

The permission question nobody raises

Most of these tools ask for Full Disk Access, and several ask for Accessibility permissions so they can move windows. Both are broad grants: Full Disk Access means an app can read anything your user can, including Mail, Messages and browser data.

That is not a reason to refuse — a cleaner that cannot see your files cannot clean them — but it is a reason to care who you are granting it to. Prefer open-source tools where you can, prefer established companies where you cannot, and check System Settings → Privacy & Security every few months to see what has quietly accumulated. A utility you stopped using two years ago should not still have read access to your entire home folder.

What not to bother with

• Antivirus. macOS has XProtect and Gatekeeper built in, and for a user who installs software from the App Store and known developers, a third-party scanner is mostly a background process that makes the fans run.
• "Memory cleaner" apps. macOS manages memory aggressively on purpose, and free RAM is wasted RAM. An app that reports it has "freed 4 GB" has mostly forced the system to discard caches it wanted.
• Registry-cleaner equivalents. There is no registry. Anything marketed as fixing one is selling you a Windows idea.
• Duplicate finders, usually. Fine in principle, but automatic deletion of "duplicates" across a photo library is how people lose originals. Sort by size in Finder first.

What to actually install

Rectangle, AppCleaner, Stats and Maccy on day one, all free. Use the machine for a month. If you then find yourself repeatedly wanting something specific — better window layouts, a proper launcher, a clipboard manager with search — buy that one thing. If it turns out to be four things, look at Setapp and do the arithmetic honestly.

If you are setting up a Mac for development work specifically, the hardware question matters more than the software one, and our MacBook versus Linux desktop comparison covers where each stops being the right machine.