Macworld:
Released in 2010, MacKeeper has been dogged by accusations that it exaggerates security threats in order to convince customers to buy. Its aggressive marketing has splashed MacKeeper pop-up ads all over the web.
These days, MacKeeper has gone to a subscription-based pricing model rather than a $39.95 one-off payment. It costs $7.95 a month in the U.S. for the premium, year-long plan. Its latest feature is offering phone support from Apple-certified technicians, which it calls Human Inside.
But many of the tools in the software bundle, which includes an antivirus (AV) scanner and 15 other utilities, are already in OS X or available for free.
Macworld takes a light touch on the tsunami of criticism about the software and the various companies that have and do own it but it’s fairly common knowledge that, at the very least, you really don’t need to waste money on MacKeeper. MacKeeper has been known to be, at minimum, almost useless and, at its worse, to cause actual problems with your Mac.
MacKeeper is malware.
Is MacKeeper legit? Their ads are so obnoxious that it never occurred to me that they might be anything but malware, sorry.
I read that as MacKreeper..
I can’t believe 650,000 people bought this.
““Sure, it may not be this massive amount of data, but these are things that you’ll never use,” Fowler said. “You’ll probably never activate Chinese.”
Fowler pointed out that there is a pop-up window with more information on one of the warning screens. That message justified the warnings and said MacKeeper found “a relatively large amount of unneeded files” that could eventually affect a computer’s performance or security.”
The ““a relatively large amount of unneeded files” that could eventually affect a computer’s performance or security” really burns me up. What a bunch of bullshit. There are no security risks WHATSOEVER with keeping the language files where they are, and considering the size of hard drives now, there is no advantage in removing them either. I hope this company gets sued into oblivion.
Depends on your definition. They are a legit company but their software is of suspect usefulness.
Five years of trickery and scaremongering. Is Macworld going easy on them because they’re now a sponsor?
I wonder. I certainly hope not.
What happened to your picture?
Wow, Macworld sponsored by the most obnoxious snake oil salesmen in the world of Macs? Sad.
Yeah, it’s disappointing when otherwise trustworthy sites promote junk like this. http://www.loopinsight.com/2010/07/14/review-mackeeper-system-utility/
This article was actually written by IDG News Service, which is another division of the company. They write news, analysis, and features for any IDG site to use. I decided to put it on Macworld because I thought it was really well done. I love that they hired an independent firm to evaluate it as an antivirus program, and I appreciated that they talked to MacKeeper’s new owners about their response to the most common complaints. We want readers to be able to make up their own minds, but I think this article is pretty damning, while still staying fair. (That’s hard to do!)
As for ads, I did see a MacKeeper ad on the site the other day. (In the article, its PR rep explains that they buy 60 million ad impressions a month across the web, all aimed at Mac users.) Macworld’s ads are sold by TechNetwork (another part of IDG), a real-time bidding ad network. The editorial staff doesn’t know who is buying ads until the ads appear on the site, and they don’t influence our coverage. I think this article shows that—it calls out MacKeeper for charging for utilities that are built-in or widely available for free, and links to our how-tos for getting it off your Mac.
While I mostly agree…
Remember you can still get a MacBook Air with a 128GB SSD.
At that point, removing stuff (like one report that the unused voices for OSX were taking up over 4 gigs) starts to be relevant.
Not everyone is using a desktop with a multi-terabyte drive, remember.
I have a client who’s Mac was completely brought down by this crap software. Even thou I had forewarned him against installing it. He didn’t even have a relocation of installing it. He lost en entire day of productivity because he had to take his Mac in to the Apple store to get it working again. MacKeeper, keeps you Mac down.
Is CleanMyMac any better? Not in my testing. But they advertise on your site ….