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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

If I wasn't a dev, I'd be pissed to find out some compiler toolchain IDE gongshow eating up 5-15GB of my disk space

Yeah, but the essentials that most command line builds require wouldn't even take up 10% of that. Apple already wastes gigabytes on printer drivers and extra languages you don't need.

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Your house is not for developers! It did not come with a free computer when you bought it! Even though a computer would only cost as little as 0.2% of the cost of the house, and the previous owner already wasted tons of money on the useless peach trees in the yard.

hm, how come gcc comes for free on lunux, and install is as easy as: >> sudo apt-get install gcc

You try that command in a base Arch install and get back to me. You're basically blaming Apple for not having a package manager, even though that's clearly the responsibility of the community.

Sure, but if you are a dev, installing the necessary tools is a pretty easy and painless thing to do. If you aren't a dev (like most people), why have it installed at all?

Since Snow Leopard, printer drivers are no longer included with the OS either. Instead, they are downloaded through Software Update as soon as you plug a printer in.

Having said that, the fact that Xcode is listed on the Mac App Store instead of just in the developer portal, I suspect that Apple will bundle Xcode 4 with Lion to try to encourage more app development.

Actually I think Snow Leopard stripped out a lot of those extra gigabytes; only a few printers have drivers out of the box now.

No doubt, hence why just the toolchain would be awesome. I don't even use Xcode.

> Apple already wastes gigabytes on printer drivers and extra languages you don't need.

No, they didn't. For example, Snow Leopard downloads printer drivers from Apple as you need them.

Extra languages are still there though. But I think this is good, mom uses her Mac Mini in Hebrew, my account uses English, dad uses our native Portuguese (I live in Brazil).

You likely don't need printer drivers or a developer tool chain to get your computer set up enough to connect it to WiFi or ethernet. You probably do need different languages if the one the computer defaults to is not one with which you are familiar.

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