Posted on 01/21/2015 10:23:51 PM PST by Swordmaker
Literally every time I work in the computer store, we'll get a customer whose Mac is plagued with problems they don't understand: Their Mac is acting slow. It crashes. And more. And in more cases than not, we find that they've installed a program called MacKeeper. Removing MacKeeper fixes the problem. So what is MacKeeper and why should you avoid it?
MacKeeper was originally developed by a company called Zeobit and was sold a couple of years ago to another firm called Kromtech. The software purports to be a suite of more than a dozen individual utilities that are actually supposed to improve the performance and stability of your Mac — antivirus software, optimization software, junk removal tools and more.
MacKeeper uses scare ads that appear as "pop-under" ads on web sites, telling people to clean their Macs. The pop-under business is the first thing I really don't like about MacKeeper. Quite frankly, I think it's a real bottom-feeder technique and a really low-class way to do business, and it tells me that they're not concerned with what people think of them.
MacKeeper's developers have been called out in the past for hosting fake web sites promoting their products and also for "sockpuppeting" phony user reviews. When they've been called out on this behavior in the past, they've conveniently blamed it on overly zealous affiliate marketers, saying it's not them, it's someone else. I'd posit that if your affiliate marketing strategy is attracting lying douchebags and scum, then you're the problem as much as they are.
But the real problems with MacKeeper that I can see is that it provides questionable value to most users, can destabilize an otherwise stable Mac, and embeds itself so thoroughly into the operating system that removing it is an uncomfortable and weird process.
Removing a Mac app should never be more involved than dragging it into the Trash and emptying the Trash, and perhaps entering an administrative password if it's a legit app you've downloaded from the Mac App Store. MacKeeper tries to get in your way, makes you verify that you don't want it, and even prompts you to explain why. That's not cool. That's certainly not something supported by Apple's own interface guidelines for legitimate app developers.
What's more, "uninstalling" MacKeeper doesn't get rid of all of it — you'll find various traces of it in your Mac's system library folder, and they take a bit to get rid of (just search for anything with zeobit or MacKeeper in the name, and you'll turn up files).
I've seen multitudes of forum posts and comments on web sites calling MacKeeper a virus or a malware package. The pathetic thing is that it isn't. It's just extremely persistent, poorly developed software whose developer tries very hard to keep you using the software and engages in really shady tactics to get you to use it in the first place.
I don't really understand all the whys of MacKeeper destabilizing an operating system, but I can tell you unequivocally that when we pull it from customers' Macs, they don't have those same problems anymore.
The folks who sell this software aren't thieves, for whatever it's worth. My own father tried it out on his Mac, paid for it, and immediately regretted it. After he finally extricated MacKeeper from his Mac, he requested a refund — and after a time got one, fortunately. So they will refund you if you feel like you got ripped off. (And no, he didn't come to my store to have it fixed — he's a bit more self-sufficient.)
But it'd be better if you didn't feel ripped off to begin with.
So if you've ever seen an ad for MacKeeper — even if it's here on iMore — and thought about giving it a try, my recommendation is not to. And if you do and run into problems, don't say I didn't warn you.
Thank you SO much for this article. I use both a Mac Mini and a PC, and those horrible MacKeeper ads pop up every time I go to gather graphics for my postings here on FR.
They clog up my computer, and won’t let me close out their windows without several steps.
Why on earth would ANYBODY purchase something from such an intrusive and assaultive marketing strategy?
Grrrrrr.
I HATE mackeeper. It is EEEEVILLLLL>>>>>>>>>>
Not interested in a Apple vs. Windows flame war, however...
None are immune from these types of tactics...none.
I’ve learned to go to computer forums to read up on these types of things and I’ve learned quite a bit here on FR as well...
I just can’t understand why folks keep falling for this type of crap on the internet. One would think that after all these years of this type of crap running amok on the internet and the innumerable warnings and stories about this that folks would wise up.
I fit that category. I had a 486 machine back in the day, and I got sick of worrying about viruses. What really got me was when someone who was emailing stuff I was interested in and trusted sent me a phishing attack. And I fell for it, because it came from a trusted source. I fell for it, because it preyed on my fear of viruses. You will understand, the phishing attack hit my trusted source first, and fooled him first - so if I fell for it, I have no justification for being angry at him for falling for it first.Enter OS X. I understood that it was based in Unix, and I understood that, being designed from the ground up as a multiuser, multitasking OS, Unix was inherently more robust than DOS, and that Windows sat on top of DOS. So I bought an iMac, back in G4 days. And I have stayed with OS X ever since, now on my third Mac, a 5K with fusion drive. But as you say, old WindowsThink (I suppose in light of developments in Win7 and subsequent I should call it OldWindowsThink) dies hard.
It doesn’t hurt my feelings to be reassured that OldWindowsThink is really out of date; Free at Last, as the song goes. And I learned from you that I should - and how I should - transition from operating in an Admin account to operating in a vanilla user account. So I hope that Rarestia will cut you some slack and appreciate that some of us actually need and significantly benefit from your OS X and iOS evangelism. Without it I very well might fall for something as ridiculous as MacKeeper.
Remember that I am an IT engineer. I’m paid to know Microsoft down to the core of the operating system, and I’ve spent a lot of my own money on training and certifications for their product lines.
I’ve never once said that Apple is worthless or otherwise avoid them. They have their place. They are great turnkey products. They are exceptional for users who don’t want to be power users and just need to get to social media, email, messaging, etc. They just work. I never said they didn’t.
I look around my home office and have hardware scattered everywhere. I’ve built up an extensive Microsoft/Linux lab and love what I do. Most people don’t have the time or the desire for those things. All I asked of Sword was to ease up on the MS bashing and just do a critical comparison of products. Bashing MS isn’t going to help anything. That’s all I was trying to convey.
I suspect my next development machine will be a Mac. I’m at the mercy of the state for my next box and I hear Macs are less popular with developers. I never should have checked that Mac box as my second choice. We have one Mac user and she develops on her Windows boxen now. Our only Linux developer switched to Windows as well (Groovy/Grails development).
I wish the Mac user had stayed on a Mac as she is a member of the Virus of the Month club.
I have Vista, and I use Opera.
Plenty of our developers code on Mac devices. Granted, most of them are using Parallels with Win7, but they do code on Apple devices.
The problem for corporations is that Apple devices are exorbitantly expensive, and Apple support engineers demand a high wage.
She(the Mac user) just found the Windows tools to be a lot better than the Mac. I use a lot of Windows software (SAS, Visual Studio) that just runs on Windows better.
I find that I can make any computer do what I want it to do if I use a big enough stick on it.
I made the mistake of getting MacKeeper a while back and I am still trying to get rid of it totally on one machine. I did the search for everything containing Zeobit and/or MacKeeper and nuked everything I could find but I think something is still hanging out in that computer because it slows to a crawl for no reason and has to be restarted everyday and sometimes more often than that.
These were the same problems I had before I nuked everything. Could there be remnants of the MacKeeper program lurking under different names?
At this point, I am ready to nuke the computer and get a new one. Not really cost effective but neither is the insanity incurred while using it.
Thanks for any help you can suggest.
Sea
I will be interested in this response also. I bought the hype, and tried MacKeeper a few years back. I never had any problems with it, but might want to be sure there is nothing left lurking in the “closet”, so to speak.
I’m not a Mac user, but my suggestion should to apply to any OS: why not back up your personal data, wipe the drive and reinstall the OS? Then reinstall the applications and your data.
Inconvenient? Sure, but cheaper than buying a new computer.
I’m a retired mechanical engineer myself. Are you sure you aren’t my brother’s brother-in-law? He has a PhD and retired from IBM, and has a penchant for IT stuff for fun. His son-in-law got his bell rung in an accident, and now is very sensitive to bumping his head. So what does Bill do? He makes an electronic Rube Goldberg contraption to be worn on a baseball cap, to warn the wearer if he is in danger of bumping into something.All I asked of Sword was to ease up on the MS bashing and just do a critical comparison of products. Bashing MS isn’t going to help anything. That’s all I was trying to convey.When I read that in his Christmas newsletter, my instantaneous reaction was, “Get a hard hat, stupid!” But obviously there wasn’t any fun in that!
Swordmaker says that Windows is getting close to the robustness of OS X, I’ll take that as definitive. The trouble began when that was not remotely the case. Let’s face it, the whole antivirus industry traces its roots to the excruciating lack of robustness in DOS; when Apple started running those, “I’m a Mac” ads, they dramatized a real, substantive difference in the robustness of the two systems. They were operating in an environment - the Internet - for which no one competent would have designed an OS in the way that DOS and the early versions of Windows (and BTW I’m sure that was true to a significant extent of OS 9 and prior as well) were designed. It is hard to protect a system which was designed to be trusting of everything it hears, from the vector of notoriously unreliable information which is the Internet. Even sneaker net viruses were a problem for DOS. You couldn’t possibly design a multiuser system with that much built-in naiveté. But then, the early PCs and Apple computers didn’t have the sort of hardware resources that would readily run Unix.So we have a situation where Microsoft had a legacy to support, and supporting that legacy made protecting from viruses inherently difficult and costly. Apple bit the bullet when it transitioned from its own legacy system to OS X built on Unix, and it was able to pull its users and developers across that transition. It was then able to crow about the place it had attained. Apparently now Microsoft has managed the same feat, but it did it in a long, tortuous path rather than biting the bullet and making the leap at a single bound. And since Microsoft worked to keep the public in denial about the necessity of that transition, it is not now in a position to crow about having made the transition. Doing that would suggest that users should have listened to “I’m a Mac” in the first place.
In a world where an iMac is an Intel PC, what else but legacy was the actual comparative advantage of Windows over OS X? In that situation, as you suggest, a user who isn’t constrained by legacy has been much better off getting a computer that “just works.” It’s not the power of computer/OS, it’s the need to operate legacy software that has been the whole issue. Always assuming you are willing to pay Apple’s price for the quality of computer that Apple sells, of course.
I’ve never installed MacKeeper but I can always tell when I’ve picked up a MacKeeper cookie. When I go to close Safari there’s a sinister little MacKeeper window taunting me underneath everything.
So I look for Zeobit and Mackeeper in my cookie folder and trash them and it’s all good for a few weeks. I’ve set privacy to allow cookies from sites I visit to avoid functionality issues but I wish there was a way to reject just those specific cookies since I don’t know where they’re coming from. Any Mac Geniuses on this thread?
IT stuff is DEFINITELY my hobby in which I am blessed to also be working. I have the equivalent of an enterprise environment in my home and work extensively with everything from certificates and SSL to infrastructure, networking, and application development.
I’m not going to disagree with the premise that Microsoft’s robustness was questionable in its early days. They designed a disk operating system and build up from there. Since Windows Vista, Microsoft’s approach has completely changed (for the better, IMO). If you forgo the GUI mishaps and look at the technology “under the hood,” Microsoft has completely re-engineered their operating system from the ground up. One of the headaches, for instance, with XP was that XP allowed direct kernel mode access without so much as an interrupt call from a driver or an API. This put XP at risk from the outset, but at the deployment of XP, keep in mind, the Internet was in its infancy. The 6.0 kernel (Vista and onward) is completely insulated from the operating environment and cannot be manipulated without the proper keying. Windows 8 “improved” on that with UEFI by allowing the hardware to dictate what could access the kernel.
Technical bits aside, I get what Apple has done is revolutionary. The old joke is that Windows 95 (was) Apple OSX, and in many ways, when 95 came out, it was. There’s no arguing the historical significance of Gates’ perfidy at the time, but the two companies took very different paths. Microsoft wanted to own the market through a platform that was universally applicable on any hardware. Apple, meanwhile, made the decision to proprietarily lock down their OS to their hardware, thus locking out tinkerers such as myself from ever building a computer and making it operate with software that would generally “just work.”
Apple’s products still “just work,” and that’s the draw for many to them. They are universally accepted as friendly for new users with a slight, albeit workable, learning curve, and many in specific businesses are drawn to them for their efficiency and power. However, there’s no denying that Microsoft has blossomed into a very mature development house with Server 2012 being one of the most advanced server platforms to ever hit the market. There’s almost nothing that Server 2012 CAN’T do, and I find myself in meetings all the time with executives crowing, “We CAN do that with Server 2012, and it won’t cost us anything.” Windows 8 is much the same as a platform that is highly matured with universal capabilities while not dismissing security. Users now have access to native encryption technologies with BitLocker, virtualization capabilities with HyperV, secure application access, built-in recovery capabilities, native firewall and antivirus software (don’t laugh, Defender is actually pretty good), and the list goes on.
With the introduction of Windows 10, Microsoft is now addressing what you term “legacy support.” With Windows 10, Microsoft is defiantly stating, “Your old apps will no longer work, because they are not secure. Period. Sorry about your luck.” This will enrage some software developers, but users should be applauding the decision. Apple users seldom complain about the regular updates to their OSX platform equipment, but Microsoft releases a bad patch and everyone’s throwing stones at Richmond.
And that’s really the crux of my argument here: Microsoft is always going to be a bogeyman, because they’re the biggest kid on the block. You can poke fun at the fat kid all you want, but when the fat kid grows up, drops 100 lb. and gets the ladies, what matters more? The past or the present?
Yes, that would be one way to solve the problem but very, very inconvenient. Unfortunately, that computer is in my Washington office and I can only access it remotely. I won’t be back up there until this summer.
Thanks for the suggestion though. Something to keep in mind if I don’t break down and buy one.
FWIW When I do play round robin with the machines up there, I always buy pre-owned.
Sea
There are plenty of coders who use Macs to do their work because there are distinct advantages to using a virtual machine for such purposes. For example if you DO pick up a nasty from somewhere. You really don't need to waste time in cleaning it up. You delete the virtual boot drive, fall back to another copy you keep around for just such a disaster. Down time? Maybe two minutes to delete the old boot file and boot back to the clean replacement. It's not even a Restore point type of time waste. If you are coding something that actually is intended to work at core level. . . so much the better. Nothing ventured, nothing lost, with a virtual machine.
For web designers, a Mac is the ideal platform because they can have multiple virtual machines on one computer for testing their websites on each platform and multiple browsers. . . and the Mac will run multiple virtual machines simultaneously. . . switch off as you need them.
I meant to address the previous reply to you as well, AppyPappy. . .
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3249386/posts?page=36#36
The past mattered when it was a question of, “You can’t switch to the Mac because the serious business software developers have only developed software for the PC.” And likewise, the past matters now when “Windows 8 is as secure as OS X” - but the people who can afford a Mac feel in their bones that Windows needs antivirus, and that antivirus software is a hassle and a burden on the CPU of your computer. Which has led to the situation where, although Apple doesn’t dominate PC market share, they do dominate the high profit segment of the market.It would seem that to get out of that hole, Microsoft will have to say they have improved their security. It will be a delicate problem to figure out how to save face while saying, “You know that security problem we didn’t have? Well, we fixed it.”
Try following the steps at this website.
check the steps at this link:
http://applehelpwriter.com/2011/09/21/how-to-uninstall-mackeeper-malware/
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.