If you were lucky enough to bag a new Mac for the holidays, you’re probably on the hunt for some awesome new apps to use on it. We’ve rounded up five of the best that we think every Mac owner should be using.
These apps will let you play any video, keep a close eye on precious storage space, extract important data from your iPhone and iPad backups, and more!
Screenshot: Cult of Mac
VLC
Every Mac ships with a built-in video player called QuickTime, and it’s great … until you try to play a video that QuickTime doesn’t like. When that happens, you’ll need VLC, the do-it-all media player that can handle almost any video or audio file you can throw at it.
VLC is completely free to download and use, and it packs everything you could want in a media player. It also supports subtitles, lets you stream from network links, and does cool things like speeds up or slows down playback. It’s the best video player you can download for nothing!
Price: Free
Photo: DaisyDisk
DaisyDisk
Maybe you don’t need DaisyDisk right now, but you definitely will one day. This awesome app provides detailed information on what’s taking up space on your Mac’s storage drive. It will help you weed out and remove big files you no longer need, freeing up precious storage space.
DaisyDisk can identify every single file on your Mac, so nothing can escape it. For newer Macs with smaller SSDs, it’s an essential tool.
Price: $9.99 with free trial
Photo: MacPaw
CleanMyMac X
For keeping tabs on everything else on your Mac, there’s CleanMyMac X. This must-have monitoring tool helps you free up RAM, identifies what’s slowing down your machine, cleans up junk, eliminates malware, and lots more. It can also quickly wipe browsing activity to protect your privacy.
Price: $34.95 with free trial
Photo: IMazing
iMazing
This app really deserves its name. iMazing lets you browse all the apps and files stored on your iPhone or iPad, and add music, movies and anything else from your Mac, all via drag and drop. Add to that a beautiful interface, full Wi-Fi sync support, access to parts of the iOS file system that Apple hides from you, and full automatic local backup, and you have a totally essential app.
What’s more, that backup is wireless, and incremental, so you can roll back to a previous backup, while taking up hardly any more space than a single backup. Save iOS apps on your Mac (great for new M1 Macs), and drop movies directly into the Videos app or other apps like Infuse. It’s totally amazing.
Price: $44.99 with free trial
Dashlane
Dashlane
Dashlane is a password-management app, which doesn’t sound very exciting until you consider the alternative — remembering passwords in your own human brain. The app integrates wonderfully well with iPhone, iPad, Mac and anything else you might use (even Windows PCs).
Dashlane can fill out passwords inside Safari and other browsers, and it also remembers other important information, like credit card numbers, receipts, documents and more. Note: Dashlane is the official password manager of Cult of Mac.
Price: Free (with in-app purchases)
