An Annual Mac Checkup: 10 Things to Do Every Year

The car gets an annual inspection. The dryer vent gets cleaned out. The smoke detectors get fresh batteries. The Mac, on which you spend more hours than any of those, gets nothing — and then we wonder why it feels old at year three.

This is the annual checkup I run on my own Macs every January, plus the slightly-modified version I run for friends and family. Plan 60–90 minutes. Pair it with something boring — laundry, a long podcast, the tax-document gathering you’re putting off.

1. Verify the backup actually works

Pretty much every year I find at least one Mac in my circle whose Time Machine drive has been silently disconnected for months. Check yours: open Time Machine preferences, look at “Latest Backup.” If it’s more than a few days old, something’s wrong — backup drive disconnected, drive failed, permissions got weird.

The deeper test: try to restore a specific file. Pick something you know exists, like a document from three weeks ago. Use the Time Machine browser (hold Option, click the menu bar Time Machine icon → Browse Other Backup Disks) to navigate back to a recent date and verify you can pull a file out.

A backup you’ve never tested is a wish. Once you’ve successfully restored even one file, you’ve proven the chain end-to-end.

2. Check battery health (if it’s a laptop)

Apple Menu → About This Mac → More Info → System Report → Power. Two numbers matter:

• Cycle Count — how many full charges the battery has gone through. Modern MacBooks are rated for ~1000 cycles before significant degradation.
• Maximum Capacity — current capacity vs. when new. Below 80% and Apple’s diagnostic flags it as needing service.

If you’re under 500 cycles and above 85%, the battery is fine — no action needed. If you’re over 80% capacity but the runtime feels much shorter than it used to, that’s likely a software issue (background processes), not a battery issue. Run Activity Monitor → Energy and look at top consumers.

If you’re below 80% capacity, Apple Menu → System Settings → Battery → Battery Health should also flag it. Replacement is $129–$249 at Apple, depending on model. AppleCare may cover it.

3. Audit your installed apps

Open Applications. Switch Finder to List view, click the Date Last Opened column header to sort. Anything you haven’t opened in 6+ months: ask whether you really need it.

Be honest. The “I might use it sometime” reasoning keeps people on a 95%-full SSD. If you haven’t opened it in a year, you’re not going to. Drag it to the Trash.

But — and this is important — Trash doesn’t fully uninstall. The app’s:

• Preferences (~/Library/Preferences/com.[vendor].[app].plist)
• Caches (~/Library/Caches/com.[vendor].[app])
• Application Support (~/Library/Application Support/[AppName])
• Logs (~/Library/Logs/)
• LaunchAgents (~/Library/LaunchAgents/)

are all left behind, sometimes totaling several gigabytes. A complete annual app audit means hunting these down too. Manually, it’s tedious. With a proper uninstaller, it’s one click per app.

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4. Audit privacy and security permissions

System Settings → Privacy & Security. Walk through each category in the sidebar. The big ones:

• Camera — you’ll find apps you forgot about
• Microphone — same
• Screen Recording — every screen-share tool you ever tried
• Full Disk Access — be picky here; this is high-trust permission
• Files and Folders — granular sandbox permissions
• Accessibility — dangerous category, automation tools live here
• Location Services — most apps that have it don’t need it

For each app you don’t recognize or no longer use, uncheck or remove. Worst case, an app stops working and re-prompts you for the permission. Best case, you’ve cleaned up real privacy risk from forgotten apps.

5. Update macOS and apps

This is the year you check whether you should upgrade major macOS version. If you’re on Sonoma 14 and Sequoia 15 is current, the question is: are your critical apps compatible? Look up your top 5–10 apps’ system requirements. If all support the new version, the upgrade is generally fine.

Even if you don’t do a major upgrade, do install all available point updates. Apple Menu → System Settings → General → Software Update. Then App Store → Updates. Then non-App Store apps individually (most have an in-app updater).

6. Clear out years of accumulated junk

The annual deep clean. Targets:

• System and user caches (/Library/Caches/, ~/Library/Caches/)
• Logs (~/Library/Logs/, /private/var/log/)
• Old iOS device backups (~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/) — for phones you don’t own anymore
• Old iOS Software Updates (~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/)
• Mail downloads (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads/)
• Language files for apps shipped in 30 languages you don’t speak
• Trash, Downloads folder old content

The aggregate is often 30–80 GB after a year of normal use. This is where annual cleanup recovers visible storage.

7. Run Disk Utility First Aid

Open Disk Utility (Applications → Utilities). Select your boot volume. Click First Aid. Confirm.

It runs fsck on the volume — checks the filesystem for inconsistencies. On a healthy disk it finishes quickly with “Operation successful.” If it finds issues, it tries to repair them. Filesystem corruption is rare on APFS, but when it happens, First Aid catches it before it gets worse.

Repeat for any external drives connected as part of your normal workflow.

8. Physical cleaning

The part nobody likes:

1. Power down. Don’t clean a powered-on Mac.
2. Screen. Slightly damp microfiber. Plain water. Never glass cleaner. Never paper towels.
3. Keyboard. Compressed air at an angle. Don’t blast straight down.
4. Speakers and vents. Compressed air. On MacBook Pros the vents are along the edges and bottom; on iMacs they’re along the back of the screen.
5. Ports. Compressed air to clear lint. If a charging cable feels loose, the port is probably packed with pocket fluff.
6. Bottom case. Slightly damp microfiber. If feet are peeling off, replacement feet are cheap online.

Total time: 10–15 minutes. Improves thermals slightly, cosmetically improves the machine a lot.

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9. Document and password hygiene

Things people forget that are worth doing once a year:

• Update your password manager’s recovery info. If you’ve moved, changed your phone, or changed email, the recovery flows for 1Password / Bitwarden / etc. need updating.
• Export 2FA codes to a backup somewhere you’ll find them in a panic. Not on your Mac. (1Password and Authy handle this; if you use only Google Authenticator, set up a sync target or move to a manager that supports backup.)
• Review SSH keys and tokens in ~/.ssh/ if you’re a developer. Any keys you’ve forgotten the purpose of, you can probably remove.
• Browser saved passwords. If you don’t use a real password manager, at least clean out passwords for accounts you’ve closed.

10. Honest evaluation: should you replace this Mac?

This is the part most maintenance guides skip. Once a year, look at the Mac honestly:

• How old is it? (Apple supports macOS for ~7 years on most models. Earlier than that, the hardware itself is fine, just stuck on older OS.)
• Is the battery still serviceable? (Below 80% capacity AND inconvenient runtime = consider service or replacement.)
• Are you constantly fighting for storage on the built-in drive?
• Are apps you need refusing to support your current macOS version?
• Is the screen still good?

If two or more of those are “yes,” you might be at the point where annual maintenance is keeping a slowly losing machine alive — and a new Mac would be a better use of money than yet more cleanup. There’s no shame in this. A 2017 MacBook Pro served honorably; you don’t owe it forever.

If everything is fine, set a calendar reminder for one year from today. The accumulation will start over the moment you finish.

A note on this checklist’s order

I’ve put them roughly in order of “if you only have time for X, do these first.” Backup verification is #1 because if you skip everything else and just do that, you’re at least protected when something goes wrong. Battery and disk health follow because they’re hardware-touching items where a problem caught early saves real money. The cleaning and audit work, while valuable, can technically wait.

If you only have 30 minutes once a year, do items 1, 2, and 7. If you have 90 minutes, do all of them. The effort scales gracefully.