Intego Washing Machine X9 Review

Intego’s Washing Machine X9 functions as a handy cleaning utility for the Mac and focuses on reclaiming disk space via the Reclaim tool, removing duplicate files on your Mac’s hard drive with the Duplicates tool, and organizing folders using the Organize tool.

See how Intego’s Washing Machine compares to other Mac Cleaners in our Best Mac Cleaner round-up.

Washing Machine currently retails for $19.99/£19.99 for one Mac for one year, $26.99/£23.99 for three Macs for one year, or $33.95/£30.99 for five Macs for one year, their prices having been discounted from $49.99/£49.99, $66.99/£66.99, and $84.99/£84.99 per year, respectively. The software is also available for a trial period, with a 30-day money back guarantee, albeit you’ll initially pay for it with your debit or credit card, PayPal, or Apple Pay.

Like most utilities on the current macOS architecture, the software (compatible with macOS 13 High Sierra or later) requires that you download it, install it, then grant it full access to your hard drive though your Mac’s Privacy and security settings. This is where things became a little trickier than expected, as you’ll have to locate the Intego Washing Machine X9 app in your Applications folder after installing it and drag it into the Full Disk Access element of your Privacy and Security settings to get it to function.

Once installed, you can get to work, and there’s a good level of customization for each tool. Like similar applications, the Reclaim tool can chase after caches, downloads, language files, logs, and trash files to help clean up disk space. My initial run cleared approximately 24GB of drive space from my M2 MacBook Pro’s SSD.

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The Duplicates tool took about five hours to create an initial index for my 1TB SSD. It offered control over duplicates that can be selected and specific options and naming filters (such as allowing you to keep the local files on your hard drive and go after external/cloud files) which came in handy. You might want to carefully pick and choose which duplicate files to go after, instead of nuking everything outright with the “Clean” button just in case you need a local copy of a file on hand later. The Organize feature seems well-intended and can help organize messy folders into a Snapshot folder for reorganization later. This tool can work with specific folders such as the ever-messy Desktop folder, your Home folder, and macOS’ Smart Folders, and help pull things into order.

While there are some interesting features and customizability within Intego’s Washing Machine X9, there’s also room for improvement. The Scheduling option only allows for a specific week or month to be chosen, and it would have been nice for users to be able to schedule a process for only a few minutes from now, as is common with similar software. The extra steps in installation and setup, as mentioned above, don’t add to the program’s ease of use, as it seems more common that an installer will add an easy icon that can be dragged into the macOS Full Disk Access pane to complete the installation (it is lazy of the developers to forget this).

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Though well-intentioned, the Organize feature just feels like slapping a band-aid on the larger problem of a folder’s disorganization, and I can readily create a new folder on my Desktop called “Desktop Stuff,” drag everything into it, and now call it organized. By creating a Snapshot folder and dragging everything into that folder, I don’t see the problem as solved, and only putting in the geeky sweat and tears of carefully sifting through a folder will resolve the issue in the long run.

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Should you buy Intego Washing Machine?

Washing Machine does what several other Mac cleaner products on the market are currently doing, with nothing groundbreaking to offer. The Organize tool feels like a cheap band-aid has been slapped on a larger organizational problem with no great fix being offered. It feels as if the product itself has been abandoned, Intego’s website citing benchmarks and results from 2020 and macOS Big Sur, and the occasional pop-up on the application’s main screen asking for feedback doesn’t inspire one to offer the developer the feedback it’s requesting, but just irritates the user, who only wants to use their Mac and get some work done. The end result is that none of this is inspired, and while it’s nice to be able to reclaim a few dozen gigabytes of drive space and have control over the duplicate files on your Mac, the end results don’t match Intego’s self-laudatory marketing on its product website. The product can meet modest expectations, but not extraordinary ones.

With the current discounts and its attractive user interface it’s worth a look. Alternatively, Intego’s Washing Machine X9 is bundled with Intego’s larger security suite so you could take advantage of that and get a Mac Cleaner with Intego’s Antivirus solution. The Mac Premium Bundle costs from $84.99/£84.99 (currently discounted to $39.99/£33.99) and includes VirusBarrier, NetBarrier, Content Barrier, and Personal Backup solutions.