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Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

I got a MacBook Air 2020 with 128GB storage to use mostly for browsing and light dev and that quickly filled up. It's like the OS tries to obsolete the machine as quickly as possible. The biggest annoyance is Finder telling me most of the storage is used by "Other".

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The iPhone is doing the same. The unremovable caches will kill your space with time.

I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings.

But this behavior is not specific to the Apple Music app - any other can do it too. Any caches from social apps you use have a high chance of being untraceable - it all goes into "Other".

Why? Try buying a model with a higher capacity to get an answer.

I also saw this behavior with an Android device - where removing a messenger on my grandfather’s phone freed up 20+ GB of space.

The worst was podcasts. If you played a podcast without downloading it first, the entire thing would be cached forever.

I learned that the hard way after a NY to Miami road trip when I binged “Hardcore History”

I once found 15gb+ of Spotify cache from my 256gb MacBook. Deleted the app and use the web player now.

The cache is there for your benefit (and theirs too), so that you don't have to constantly re-download the same song over and over, which matters to some people that have bandwidth restrictions. There's a button in their settings that lets you clear it with ease

It doesn’t benefit me much as I have unlimited bandwidth and I can download an entire song in 10 seconds so don’t have any buffering.

I can see how it saves Spotify some bandwidth costs.

But I hate big caches as I don’t really think about them until my disk is full and I need to do something.

I wish programs would be better stewards of user resources.

I’ve had my music cached locally since the 90s.

People ask why everything is web apps and there's the answer - It's a layer of sandboxing that users have _at least some_ control over.

I feel like I'd have a better chance clearing the cache for the app than the cache for the web app.

It's a few clicks in any browsers dev tools or a few more clicks in the settings, and is the same for every website.

With a native app the cache could be in any number of places on your hard drive, you have to depend on a function being in the app to clear it, deleting it manually might have unknown side effects, and it's all nonstandard.

Websites can’t write to arbitrary places on your FS and the browser has a central way to delete the data that a website can write.

Desktop apps can write anywhere, and what it writes might or might not be a cache, so there’s no way to centrally manage it. Apps like cache-cleaners simply hard-code common cache paths for common apps.

Teams web version has local storage of 2gb.

The problem is developers don’t know what the hell they’re doing

The problem is devs have beefy computers with 2TB SSDs.

In music, producers would listen to their mix on different audio systems, including crappy radios.

Not just the producers, but musicians often do this as well (the good ones anyway!)

Eh? People have some control over native apps too. It’s just a trade-off of what you want to control. I like how I can control the time I spend in my workflow just because native apps are faster and more battery-efficient, and don’t override OS gestures and mouse events within their own windows.

The problem with the web player is that the volume normalization feature is missing.

> I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings.

Wait—really? I don't use Apple Music, but surely with heavy use, you could easily end up with a cache that's hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes large...

At least with iOS 16 this isn't an issue, not sure about prior versions. In Settings for Apple Music, it shows you a list of all artists, inside their listing is the albums, and inside there the songs you have downloaded. You can delete at each level (artist, album, or individual song). But it definitely removes items from the cache or, yeah, I'd have been out of storage a long time ago.

What's the timescale here, for "The unremovable caches will kill your space with time". I'm currently holding an iPhone 11 running the iOS 16 beta, that I got in October of 2019. Looking at Storage, I'm sitting at 67GB used of 256GB. The heavy hitter app-wise is Spotify at 13GB, but that's all music that I specifically told it to keep locally. "Other System Data" is 22GB.

If you have the 256gb model you’re not affected, but there are lots of devices out there with between 8 and 64gb of storage.

That doesn't really line up with the comment I replied to. It suggests that over time, space usage will continue to grow as part of some kind of planned obsolescence. That's the premise I was questioning.

None of the 128GB range were viable in the slightest.

They were all a borderline scam and even after deleting GarageBand etc the usable space was close to broken.

Sorry but this line only existed to force people who know it’s a scam to pay $100 more

Same deal with the 16gb iPhone lines.

They were, and still are viable devices to some people. I only upgraded from a 128gb mbp and a 16gb iphone this year, after using them for 7 and 6 years respectively. Storage was never an issue with the laptop, and only became a problem with the iphone in the last couple of years.

Not for most. I used a 16 GB iPhone SE with only a handful of apps for a while, but the biggest problem was the NY Times app where I get my news. Its cache will grow without bound, and once it would get to ~2 GB every few weeks I'd have to uninstall and reinstall the app to delete the cache. (Later on they created an option in settings to delete the cache.)

I thought the 16 GB phone would work for me since I keep everything in the cloud -- no downloaded photos/music/nothing. Nope, and it was all because of app caches. I got so sick of having to uninstall and reinstall some app literally every week to clear its cache.

As someone with a 128 GB model, I manage just fine. This is not the same as selling 16 GB models 3 or so years ago (that was ridiculous). It’s only a “scam” if you’re someone that needs more space and thinks having a “just fine” lower tier is a scam.

There are two kinds of people who don't need a lot of disk space on their laptop:

1. Those with few big things - these people just don't need a lot of disk space

2. Those with lots of big things - no matter what you do your laptop can't hold everything, so you have a different place for the overflow anyway.

Personally, I think 128GB is crazy small, but it's been working fine for my wife for years, so what do I know?

It’s all down to your use case. I get by with a 16gb iPhone fine and have a 128gb MBA with have the space free.

Try something like disk inventory X. It's a life saver.

There's a useful Apple-created tool built right into the OS:

1. Cmd-space for Spotlight

2. Type Storage Management

3. Hit Review Files

Now you can sort by largest files and quickly make an impact on space used.

The only problem I had with Apple's storage management utility is that it kept reporting a Steam game using 27G when that game was long deleted (and Steam itself was deleted). To resolve this, I had to go to the ~/Library/Application Support directory and completely remove the Steam folder (which didn't actually have that 27G game anywhere in it.)

My longstanding favorite for this has been OmniDiskSweeper[0]. It's dead simple and I've been using it for just about the entirety of OS X's existence.

[0]: https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

Gotta put a word in for daisy disk! Maybe you're paying for some fancy animations, but by golly are they nice LOL.

I second Daisy Disk. When I made the leap from Windows to mac in the early 00s I wanted something to replace the freeware “scanner” I had found so entirely useful.

http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/

What’s the advantage of Daisy Disk over the built-in “About this Mac -> Storage -> Manage”? Always interested in lovely boutique MacOS software, but in this case the website doesn’t sell it well as an alternative to what’s already available.

Some of the best functional data vis out there. For those wondering the chart type used by daisy disk is called a zoomable sunburst.

DaisyDisk is great. Best $10 on an app I've ever spent (circa 2015)

Put my vote in for `ncdu` (just skip your iCloud folders)

I agree, ncdu is a great and easy to use command line tool.

On Mac OS, run for example:

   ncdu -x --exclude /Volumes --exclude /System/Volumes /

This scans the root filesystem but excludes the Volume mounts specifically (the -x option to limit the scan to the current filesystem doesn't work properly on mac os). Navigate through the folders, sorted by size, from there. Press d to delete a folder.

Oh wow thank you

Disk Inventory X is great and that's how I found out the speech folder on my OS X was taking like 12GB.

It’s borderline criminal that these were sold with soldered-on SSD’s that can never be upgraded. It makes piles of otherwise completely useful laptops unusable pieces of shit. Same with the RAM.

The environmental damage alone that comes from this practice is heart wrenching. No possible performance benefits can be worth the damage it does.

“Other” is probably 90% from ~/Library/Application Support/. Because apps like Chrome are too lazy to split things out of there to make them legible to the OS — e.g. putting their cache dirs under ~/Library/Caches/, etc.

I’m old enough to remember when 128GB meant something

Wow. So old. My first computer had 16kb.

Luxury! Mine had 3.2k (Vic—20)

i'm amazed that they still sell/sold 128gb versions that late. I remember deciding never to get a computer with that small a hard drive again a bit less than 10 years ago. it clutters up so fast.

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