Yep, it is an awful situation. I'm increasingly becoming frustrated with how Apple keeps disrespecting users.

I downloaded several MacOS installers, not for the MacBook I use, but intending to use them to create a partitioned USB installer (they were for macOS versions that I could clearly not even use for my current MacBook). Then, after creating the USB, since I was short of space, I deleted the installers, including from the trash.

Weirdly, I did not reclaim any space; I wondered why. After scratching my head for a while, I asked an LLM, which directed me to check the system snapshots. I had previously disabled time machine backup and snapshots, and yet I saw these huge system snapshots containing the files I had deleted, and kicker was, there was no way to delete them!

Again I scratched my head for a while for a solution other than wiping the MacBook and re-installing MacOS, and then I had the idea to just restart. Lo and behold, the snapshots were gone after restarting. I was relieved, but also pretty pissed off at Apple.

Because Apple differentiates their products by their storage sizes, they also sell iCloud subscription. There is zero (in fact negative) incentive to respect your storage space.

I had the same problem and had some luck cleaning things up by enabling "calculate all sizes" in Finder, which will show you the total directory size, and makes it a bit easier to look for where the big stuff is hiding. You'll also want to make sure to look through hidden directories like ~/Library; I found a bunch of Docker-related stuff in there which turned out to be where a lot of my disk space went.

You can enable "calculate all sizes" in Finder with Cmd+J. I think it only works in list view however.

The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.

Even worse on ipad. My wife is an artist and 100gigs of "system data" is completely inscrutable and there's zero ways to fix it besides a full wipe.

Seconding.

I should not have to hack through /Libary files to regain data on a TB drive because Osx wanted to put 200gbs of crap there in an opaque manner and not give the user ANY direct way to regain their space.

I simply run GrandPerspective (GUI app, https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/), or dust (terminal app, https://github.com/bootandy/dust), to give me an idea of what is going on with disk usage.

Equally egregious are applications that insist on using the primary disk to cache model data/sample data/whatever

My 256gb Mac Mini currently has 65gb of "System Data" and 40gb of "MacOS"

Gotta hit that docker system prune -a

> Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

Your friend is called ncdu and can be used as follows:

    sudo ncdu -x -e --exclude Volumes /System/Volumes/Data/

    sudo du -sh ~/Library/Messages
    Password:
    du: /Users/cvaske/Library/Messages: Operation not permitted

Edit: investigating a bit more, apparently the lack of a sudo-equivalent, an "elevate this one process temporarily" command is intentional in the design, so that malicious scripts can't take advantage of that "this is really the user" approval path. I can't say I agree with that design decision, but at least it's an ethos.

Offloading to the cloud and charging the user seems like a bigger breach of expectations than the hard drive space.

Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.

Agreed, it should work like the iCloud Photos library; cache locally, but pull from the cloud when necessary.

System Settings > General > Storage. Click the ⓘ next to Messages. Sort by size and delete large attachments.

I'm on 5G right now and it just struggled to load the HN front page due to local network congestion. At times of day when it's not congested it reaches 60-90Mbyte/s in the same physical location

Spotify just gave up while trying to show me my podcasts. I can't listen to anything not already downloaded right now.

Yet at 3am I'll be able to download a 100GB LLM without difficulty onto the same device that can't stream a podcast right now.

Unfortunately I don't think 5G is the streaming panacea you have in mind. Maybe one day...

Only reason I still download from Apple Music to device is for lossless and hi-res lossless, which would otherwise use a lot of cellular data.

On 5G, it depends. There are still plenty of people around the world who don't have unlimited data plans.

Not sure what you have against it. Works great for me. No subscription required. And if I do want to pay for ad free shows and support creators it's easy to do so.

Use whatever you like but I don't think Podcast app users are rare by any stretch of the imagination.

It's absolutely fine, from what I can tell

AFAIK the native Podcast app for iPhone is the only way to make PC-phone podcast file syncing work. This stops you downloading the same podcast file twice, once on your PC and once on your phone.

It probably has more active users than all third party podcast apps on all mobile platforms combined. The power of defaults.

It's generally a good app. People in the tech community like Overcast, but I've always found its UI completely illogical. Apple Podcasts is organized like I'd expect a podcast app to be.