Can we talk about drive space for a minute?
In what universe is it ok for macOS (and "System Data") to consume 80GB out of a 250GB drive on an entry level M3 MacBook Air. I myself have been working in IT for 20+ years so I'm familiar with bloat, but it usually gets attention and there is an effort to reduce bloat by the offending company. That's what I'm hoping for from this post - that we can bring this issue to light and Apple will make an effort to reduce the bloat. Stock Win11 installs are usually around 30ish GB. Community projects have pushed Win11 Tiny (Tiny11) down to less than 10GB. I want that same treatment for macOS.
This Air happens to be primarily used for my kids. They do have some files, but we have full iCloud syncing turned on. Yet it is still out of space. I can go through and do some hard core cleanup and get maybe 20GB reclaimed, but looking at macOS, I have to wonder why it needs so much itself.
It looks like 10-15GB is used for Apple Intelligence so I have turned that off. The System Data partition includes log files, config files, apfs snapshots, other files that are "supposedly essential for macOS to operate." I understand that is the company line for why these files exist. If I could get into System data, I'm sure I could browse through it and see "oh yes, this is the executable for zsh" or "This runs the Dock", etc. I know there are essential files. But Apple needs to do a better job of reducing some of these files if they will not up the default storage of their entry level machines. The combination of small storage and bloat makes these have an extremely limited lifespan and could almost be a legal issue of planned/forceful obsolescence.
In what universe is it ok for macOS (and "System Data") to consume 80GB out of a 250GB drive on an entry level M3 MacBook Air. I myself have been working in IT for 20+ years so I'm familiar with bloat, but it usually gets attention and there is an effort to reduce bloat by the offending company. That's what I'm hoping for from this post - that we can bring this issue to light and Apple will make an effort to reduce the bloat. Stock Win11 installs are usually around 30ish GB. Community projects have pushed Win11 Tiny (Tiny11) down to less than 10GB. I want that same treatment for macOS.
This Air happens to be primarily used for my kids. They do have some files, but we have full iCloud syncing turned on. Yet it is still out of space. I can go through and do some hard core cleanup and get maybe 20GB reclaimed, but looking at macOS, I have to wonder why it needs so much itself.
It looks like 10-15GB is used for Apple Intelligence so I have turned that off. The System Data partition includes log files, config files, apfs snapshots, other files that are "supposedly essential for macOS to operate." I understand that is the company line for why these files exist. If I could get into System data, I'm sure I could browse through it and see "oh yes, this is the executable for zsh" or "This runs the Dock", etc. I know there are essential files. But Apple needs to do a better job of reducing some of these files if they will not up the default storage of their entry level machines. The combination of small storage and bloat makes these have an extremely limited lifespan and could almost be a legal issue of planned/forceful obsolescence.
