"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."

This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.

My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.

17GB when a large majority of the devices sold for it shipped with 128GB of storage is wild. You should be able to opt out of it during install.

Phones should have separate storage for their OS so that when you buy a specific phone with specific storage it actually is that much storage available to the user

The real problem with iOS is that there’s no way to clear an app’s cache without uninstalling it. Every non-indie internet-connected app on my phone has a massive and unneeded cache that consumes gigabytes of space.

Maybe macOS 26 was lot bigger... but I went straight from Sequoia to Golden Gate and freed up like 30 GBs. I didn't have enough disk space to download the update prior, so the extra 30 GB wasn't that... but could've been caches I guess. I assumed it was dropping Intel?

If there is no way to remove this 17 GB model, then the OS is simply not for me anymore. I'll stick with Sequoia for another year and use it until it stops receiving security updates and then I'm back to being a full-time Linux user.

Same. It feels pretty messed up to lose that much storage on a 256gb device.

> when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.

Most expensive it's been for a handful of years.

1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as recently as 1994, and half a billion dollars in 1980.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

> right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.

How easily we forget the exponential improvements of decades past...

Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days. It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development. In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.