Mac Inside & Out · macOS Under the Hood · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: A Faster Mac for Aunt Joan

Help your aunt when a helpful looking site tells her to use Terminal.

Aunt Joan's speed tip

Your Aunt Joan calls. Her MacBook feels slow, so she searched "speed up my Mac" and clicked the top result. It's a tidy page called "Mac Speed Tips" with a smiling cartoon computer.

The page says:

1. Press Command+Space and type Terminal.
2. Copy the line below, paste it in and press Return.

The line is long and looks like a jumble. It starts with "curl". The page promises her Mac will feel brand new in one minute. Aunt Joan has already pasted it into Terminal. Her finger is over the Return key.

"It looks so professional," she says. "Lots of people must use it. Should I go ahead?"

The password box

Aunt Joan closes Terminal without pressing Return. Then she scrolls further down the page. It says, "After you run the command, a box will ask for a password. Type it in to finish the speed up."

She asks why a speed tip would need that. You remember how these stealers work.

A cleaner app with big asks

The page also offers a free app called "SpeedyClean". A week ago, before calling you, Aunt Joan installed it. When it first opened, it asked her to turn on two things in System Settings: Full Disk Access and one more. She clicked yes to both.

She reads you the second one. It's the permission that lets an app click and type on her Mac as if it were her.

Checking what got in

You walk Aunt Joan through finding the switches for SpeedyClean. She opens the Apple menu, then System Settings.

Once she's turned SpeedyClean off in each list, you'll help her drag the app to the Trash and change her important passwords from her iPad, just to be safe. First, though, she needs to find the right section.