How to clear your MacBook cache (and why you shouldn't wait to do it)

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Clearing browser and app cache can fix a slow Mac and free up space.
• Safari, Chrome, and your apps all stash temporary data in different places.
• MacOS lets you manage storage, so you won't need risky 'cleaner' apps.

If you use your Mac for work or school, I bet you have 17 Safari tabs open at any given time. Or maybe you use a different browser, or all the browsers. You probably also have a ton of apps installed, some of which you haven't launched since the last Olympics. Either way, you definitely have an ever-growing pile of cached data on your machine.

That's because every time you open a website or app, your Mac quietly saves bits of information -- like images, scripts, and temporary files -- so things can ...