Device: 2011 Macbook Pro
Hi. I've had my MBP for a little over a year now. Lately it seems to be getting slower, something I was told Macs don't do? Anyway I don't do any type of upkeep on it and I'm wondering if I should?
What (if any) are the utilities like windows disk cleanup & defrag etc should I be running?
You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.
These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.
Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.
Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.
With very few exceptions, you don't need to defrag on Mac OS X, except possibly when partitioning a drive.
About disk optimization with Mac OS X
You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X.
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.
Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
If you're having performance issues, this may help: