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Comment by juped | Hacker News Reader

I will say that Mac OS is incredibly disk-hungry (and MBPs get vastly more expensive when you add options like bigger (still not that big) disks). I don't want to become a Mac OS hobbyist and figure out how this happens (I like Mac OS overall because it's a BSD and I'm a BSD guy, but it is not my hobby BSD of choice) so I ended up just spending a few bucks on some "cleaner" program that purged a surprisingly huge amount of disk the first run and purges like 5 gigs a week thereafter.

I honestly don't know why it uses so much disk.

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> I honestly don't know why it uses so much disk.

Not saying it is your issue, but if you do use Time Machine, have it enabled all the time and you are not always connected to your Time Machine backup disk then Time Machine will continue to make those backups except it does them to your local disk. Because of this you will end up with time machine snapshots and you can get rid of them using the tmutil command that was referenced in the post. In order to do so, see for example [1].

In earlier macOS versions you could disable the local time machine snapshots, but I seem to recall that that no longer works (but I might be wrong on that)

[1] https://ppolyzos.com/2017/10/20/how-to-manually-delete-local...

What is wrong with using a lot of disk? If apps start faster, run faster, then using more disk is a good trade-off.

Because you're tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that you can't upgrade and the system hogging disk space reduces the space left to store the colossal 4K videos that every phone shoots these days and the VM snapshots you need?

Also every iOS virtual image includes identical files so you end up with about 5 GB of identical sample photos and other garbage for each iPhone image. Why they can't put them in a single directory and symbolically link to them is beyond me.

I say this with a 2012 MacBook that I've put a 1TB SSD in and a 2016 MacBook Pro with a fixed non-upgradeable SSD. Constantly fighting for disk space.

Unless there is some compression involved, using more disk means slower starting and running apps. Edit: even with compression, I'd argue that uncompressing is faster than reading disk.

It is good tradeoff, except when you start running out of space, MacOS does not seem to clear the caches when you start running out of space. I have 128GB MacBook Pro and removing the ~/Library/Caches was somewhat regular excercise (it occupies 5-10GB usually) I had to do when I had lots of stuff installed.

Nothing at all until you work somewhere that only buys 128GB models and the drives are soldered to the main board.

- they don't start or run faster

- to borrow another commenter's words, I'm tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that I can't upgrade (fortunately, I don't have 4k videos; unfortunately, I have too many d----d VM snapshots and the like)

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