Mac Pilot 2.0.3 – Mac OS X System Optimizer

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Face it.  We pay for convenience.  Of course we could get a 10-pound sack of potatoes for the price of an order of large fries, but we don’t want to do the hard work and time of preparing the potatoes, deep-frying them after warming up the oil and salting them before eating them. We want instant gratification.  So we go to a fast-food restaurant and get an order of fries with the rest of our meal.

Ergo Mac Pilot. Yes, there are free or shareware utilities that do many of the things that Mac pilot does, but not all. And one wonders why Apple doesn’t just buy this utility outright and use it in Mac OS X itself?  We are looking at a plethora of nice-to-have utilities that otherwise would be done manually in terminal mode. Try something like 200 of these little gems.

Josh’s Mac Pilot has an accent is on “easy”. I’m sorely tempted to post each and every one of the windows that appear when each graphic is clicked along the top “toolbar” in this app, but I won’t. Go download a 15-day evaluation copy and you judge for yourself if this is worth the $10 USD price compared to the other “similar” utilities I’ve listed above.

Sure, some of the items are one-time-wonders, but some were unfamiliar to me and I loved the fact that I could get the intuitive approach to each item and decide if I needed to make it “live” or not. After using this utility, my system responds better. And isn’t that the real point (performance improvements) of this maintenance activity?

Some nice-to-knows have been added as well such as the Ports list (which ports are being used by Mac OS X for Internet activities and the Errors list (those numbered Mac codes that are in geek and not normal-speak). Here is also a Keys button that lists the shortcut key combinations and a button off that, that leads to a character set based on font being used.

So go ahead and “apply” the processes in Mac Pilot. So far they work without a problem on my machine. They probably will on yours too. Are you willing to pay for convenience? You got a Mac didn’t you?

Compare to Other Utilities

CockTail: http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.html

Doctor Kleaner: http://www.doktorkleanor.com/en/

MacJanitor: http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

 Onyx: http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/OnyX.shtml

Tiger Cache Cleaner: http://www.northernsoftworks.com/tigercachecleaner.html

TinkerTool: http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys.html