What's Up With the 'Smaller Footprint' thingy?!

[ThE.MeSsEnGeR]

That's my question: What's Up With the 'Smaller Footprint' thingy?! why does it free up space...? it might sound dumm but well i had to know...

but i noticed an awkward thing just now, yesterday i was checking SL's features and where it says 'Smaller footprint' it said:

Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 6GB for you — enough for about 1,500 more songs or a few thousand more photos.

and today i happened to cross by that page again, and i saw this:

Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you — enough for about 1,750 more songs or a few thousand more photos.

I Mean, since they started advertising that SL will free up space they've always said 6GB... but just now it turned 7GB....?

 

[angelwatt]

It's from moving to Intel from PowerPC. They gutted the older stuff that was there for compatibility. They also revamped some of the code bases in the pre-installed apps (iChat, iTunes, etc.).

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

Maybe they've improved it even further?

 

[kymac]

wow.. hopefully its not a new feature that automatically finds and deletes 1 gig of your existing files to look more impressive as an operating system!

 

[tekio]

Apple should reword that, if I removed 7gb from my leopard install there would be nothing left.

 

[FSMBP]

I'm guessing they free 7GB from a FULL install of Leopard (aka every printer driver, languages etc.)

But yeah, Snow Leopard will take up less space on your computer. That space can then be used for more stuff. I'm not complaining

 

[Sayer]

There may be some new filesystem-level compression goin on behind the scenes. I thought I read that was a future addition, not sure if its the source of some savings or the removal of PowerPC stuff that explains all of the space savings tho.

Or maybe Snow Leopard doesn't install *all* of the printer drivers and third-party print utilities for every possible make and model. That stuff takes up a TON of space, its needed only once or twice, they get outdated quickly and can be pulled down over the Internet in seconds these days.

 

[imfrog2002]

I'm pretty sure it's all from removing the PPC stuff. Xslimmer has saved me almost 6GB from my apps by removing the PPC & Other languages. They probably cleaned up some of the code, and revised different things to save space where they could. I'm 99.99% sure it's nothing important.