Explainer

Activity Monitor is the free system monitor built into macOS. How to open it, and how to read the five tabs, including the numbers that look scary and aren't.

macOS keeps battery health and cycle count on two different screens, and tells you neither what your model was rated for nor when the wear actually matters. Here is where both numbers live, what they mean, and how to decide between a new battery and a new Mac.

"Google Chrome Helper" is Chrome's own process for displaying web pages, and seeing thirty of them in Activity Monitor is normal rather than an infection. Here's what each version of the name means, how to find the tab responsible, and which popular advice about it stopped working years ago.

Your Mac has been scanning itself for malware since the day you switched it on. What XProtect, XProtect Remediator, Gatekeeper and notarization actually do, how to check the version you have, and the honest answer on whether you need antivirus as well.

Your Mac's storage bar is full but you can't find why? Here's the complete map of where Mac storage actually goes (System Data, caches, snapshots, and the apps that quietly hoard gigabytes) and where to look for each.

A slow Mac is almost always one of four things: memory pressure, a runaway process, too many login items, or background work after an update. Here's how to tell which, and fix the real cause.

Documents taking up space on your Mac? That storage slice is broader than your Documents folder: it counts big files across your whole home folder. Here's how to shrink it.

Mac memory pressure, not free RAM, is the real signal. Here's what green, yellow, and red mean in Activity Monitor, and why RAM cleaner apps don't help.

What do Mac cleaners actually do? They clear caches, logs, and browser data, but macOS rebuilds most of it within days, so the freed-GB total is an estimate.

Purgeable space on Mac is storage macOS frees up automatically when it needs room: caches, Spotlight indexes, and local snapshots you can't delete yourself.

“Other” storage on Mac was the old name for what Apple now calls System Data: the same catch-all of caches, logs, snapshots, and backups. Here's what changed.

What is System Data on Mac? It's a catch-all storage category: a rough estimate, not a folder you can open. Here's what's in it and how to safely shrink it.

Since macOS Catalina your Mac splits the startup disk into two: a sealed read-only Macintosh HD and a writable Macintosh HD - Data volume. Here's why.

Ask Finder, df, and du how much space is free and you get three different answers, and Finder's is often just wrong. Here's why they diverge and how to get the real number.