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Comment by Stitch4223 | Hacker News Reader

“Some people” arguments always hold true.

Old classmates back in the day used to hate the 128 × 128 px icons macOS shipped. A waste of space for eye candy.

12 GB is at most 4.68% of your Mac. Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value, as is consumerizing local-first AI.

We’re not talking adware here.

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5% is huge. And the way app bundles work on macOS, tons and tons of disk space gets burned up for each application relative to on an OS like Linux distros, so each GB doesn't go as far in the first place.

It's also not the full extent of disk usage by built-in apps which aren't removable by normal means on macOS. An empty macOS installation is like 35 GB. NixOS is not known for being particularly space efficient, but 30-40 GB is how much space I use on it for the OS and all applications, including a ton of developer tools, on my graphical systems. For the base OS with a full fat desktop environment, most Linux distros have you looking at less than 10 GB. So this comes as a massive increase on an OS that already burns a ton of disk space before you even get to touch it.

True. In a highly tweakable / customizable OS you only get what you want. But you first need to understand what that means.

If you understand what that means, you can strip down any OS to the bone and will still be productive with it.

Local LLM’s take up a bunch of space today, where Apple believes this is valuable for their users. 12 GB is still smaller than the regular coding models, so they are trying to keep disk space usage in check.

By "base system", I didn't mean what you can achieve through tweaks. I meant what you end up with after a default install. I'm talking something like a vanilla openSUSE KDE install that comes with a full desktop environment; a web browser; and graphical applications including a file manager, a complete office suite, an archive manager, multimedia players, a text editor, a photo gallery, a local music player/manager, a package/update management frontend, system settings app, fat email client, etc.

The primary factor isn't that Linux distros can include fewer components, it's that traditionally they actually make proper use of shared libraries because everything installed on the system is part of a single software distribution with a unified dependency tree.

I say "traditionally" here because distros that use Snap or Flatpak for applications that ship with the OS as part of the "base system" introduce massive redundancy in a similar way to macOS. That's why I chose openSUSE for an example rather than Ubuntu.

But you can get something like a 1:1 comparison if you compare install media (which is typically compressed) to install media. Linux distro installers and Linux live media often still fit on a single DVD:

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed Live (GNOME|KDE): 1.2 GiB
  • openSUSE Tumbleweed Installer (can install KDE or GNOME, plus optional applications): 4.4 GiB
  • Fedora 44 Workstation (GNOME): 2.7 GB
  • Fedora 44 KDE: 3.1 GB
  • Ubuntu 26.4.0.1 Desktop: 6.0 GiB
  • Windows 11 25H2 ISO: 8.4 GB
  • macOS 27.0.1 InstallAssistant.pkg: 18.4 GB

macOS is more comparable here to the Linux distros than to Windows, because it comes with a more complete suite of end user applications than Windows does. It's also true that Linux distros are really good at compression when it comes to installation media and live media. But the other piece that I think is clear from these (AI slop, feel free to gather your own) numbers is that traditional Linux distros just make better use of the space in terms of the ratio of number of graphical applications to total disk usage than macOS or Windows do. They have dramatically smaller install media and dramatically smaller base installs than Windows, even though they come with an application suite more comparable to that of a Mac. macOS meanwhile just uses a ton of space both for its install media and its base installs. The difference is in significant part due to the benefits a unified software distribution offers in terms of resource sharing across packages/applications.

That's all completely aside from things like non-graphical installs or foregoing applications like an office suite (let alone foregoing a whole DE). Distros that actually try to optimize disk usage like you're suggesting end up with disk footprints way smaller (e.g., a 792 MB installer image for PuppyLinux, 1.3 GB for Bodhi Linux 7 Standard, 694 MiB for DSL 2024).

This benefit is also the footgun that let Linus Sebastian of LTT (in)famously uninstall his desktop environments with a careless package management command. Applications and the base OS form one system with heavy internal dependency sharing.

Things like app bundling and containerization have lots of advantages, especially when it comes to deployment. But they also have costs, and relative to a normal Linux distro with just one package manager, disk usage is a huge one.

The above also gives us another comparison for macOS 27: just the new machine learning models alone take up more than enough space for a complete, modern graphical operating system AND a graphical end user application suite.

4% of my disk on a computer with soldered storage hardware?

Is the marketing really getting this good?

This is going to shock you I suspect, it seems to be something many here fail to consider in any number of circumstances: You don't represent a majority of anything. A majority of people buying Macs, a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against. In fact I'd venture to guess that you like many here represent a vocal portion of a tiny minority that are almost impossible to please without the sort of full customization of hardware and software you want. It's much easier to neglect that small market in favor of the one that prints them money, and I'm always baffled that so many don't understand that.

People here misunderstand just how different they are to the norm. "I want x, y, z to be free so I can modify it!" Most people buying Apple products don't, hell most people buying any phone doesn't want that, they want a smartphone that works out of the box and never fails to be a smartphone. The walled garden is largely a feature and not a bug, it's just not a feature you want, just like the aesthetics, social factors, ease of use, etc don't matter to you as much as function.

Most people aren't like that.

> a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against

As if Apple is always right and knows what their users want. Sure they are more often than other companies but stuff like the touchbar and Siri itself for that matter prove that they do in fact make mistakes.

They’re certainly closer to what their users want than people here are. You can argue minutiae, but the numbers speak for themselves. That’s not the same as being perfect, as should be obvious; this is a comparison to all of you, not perfection.

They don’t need to make good products to be highly successful, they only need to make products which are slightly better than the competition.

As always if you think you can beat them at their own game, give it a shot. Many have tried and somehow despite everyone from Google to MS, to idealistic hackers giving it a shot Apple remains the begrudging leader because they’re better than the rest at just working.

It’s easy to compare things to an ideal in your head, “Reality has a surprising amount of detail” that gets in the way though.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. HN and Reddit are the kings of delusion in thinking they’re remotely close to even 1% of the market Apple and others are concerned about. And rightly freaking so, they represent an rounding error in revenue and generally are never happy with anything, at least anything short of a product that would be, in turn, undesirable for the other 99% of the market.

Apple's AI and harnesses are trash and a complete waste of space

Also suggesting that sacrificing 1/20 of your disk space is NBD is crazy. I have to prune space on my drive all the time because macs ship with the least amount of disk space that apple imagines they can get away with as possible.

Wrong. 12GB is potentially 9.4% of your disk. At the very least, the original M1 MacBook Air (perhaps others) could be purchased with 128GB of storage.

The M1 MacBook Air did not have a 128 GB storage option.

> The M1 MacBook Air did not have a 128 GB storage option.

There was an 128 GB model [1] that was only sold to schools.

[1]: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook...

That’s a whole 4% of my disc. Get that out of there.

    > Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value

Not if you didn't use apple intelligence in the first place (and/or aren't interested in using it going forward).

    > as is consumerizing local-first AI

If and only if there is actual demand for it. If most users do not want this, it's a bad feature.

  We’re not talking adware here.

Worse, we're talking about AI malware.

Are you arguing that the icons did not occupy a scarce resource that could have been used for other things? Or that the value is so obvious it we worth it?

Useful or not there should be an option to turn it off and get space back (plus avoid LLM) if you want.

Yes, but it’s death by a thousand cuts. I encourage you to see how much BS space is taken up by iMovie or Live Photos or whatever on your iPhone. If every team at Apple wants their percentage you end up with less.

iMovie isn't installed by default, and live photos are an option at least. Apple Intelligence requires ripping out with sketchy scripts.

Bruh the entire Mac OS used to fit in 20 GB and nothing they have added since has meaningfully improved my life, though some has made it more difficult.

That extra space is for my media.

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