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Snow Leopard's anti-bloat install has super slimming effect

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While much of Apple's recently released OS enhancements in Snow Leopard are fine-tuning rather than new features, one of the advantages of upgrading is to reverse the bloat of software installs.

As Apple is keen to point out - 'Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you - enough for about 1,750 more songs or a few thousand more photos.'

Macworld reader Jayson Brinkler was surprised, delighted even, then to discover Apple's estimation was some way out.

"I purchased and installed Snow Leopard today and was interested to find that I did not get back the 7GB of hard drive space that Apple claimed that I would get back - I got 33GB of disc space back!" Jayson tells Macworld.

"Before installing, I had 325.5GB free space on my 500GB internal drive. After install I had 358.73. I don't know if my install disc has performed magic or it has deleted files during install, which is unlikely, but nevertheless, it is intriguing."

As an owner of an anorexic MacBook Air, I'm hoping installing Snow Leopard will perform similar magic on my modest 80GB hard drive.

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Comments received


Hadrian said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

Yep its super slimming OK.. and noticeably faster

I got 12GB back on my iMac 24" 2.8Ghz

Dan said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

No magic here. Snow Leopard reports disk sizes using 1GB = 1 billion bytes. Previous versions used the more traditional binary definition, 1GiB = 1073741824 bytes.

348.9GB = 325.5GiB. So you got 10GB back, not 33GB.

David said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

Might help if Apple explained the maths Dan?

Peter said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

Definitely faster; noticed this immediately

David said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

Is the next version of Mac OS X 10.7 likely to add the bloat? Anyone know?

Vern said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

So, Leopard was (is) all bloat - great admission.

Kadoogan said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

Vern:

Snow Leopard removed all of the PPC code, this being why Leopard was the last release for older PPC based macs. This is the reason there is less space taken up by the OS. But hey, why do 30 seconds of research when you can just act like a trollish pillock instead?

KenC said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

Actually, according to Apple, adding the 64bit code balanced out any savings on PPC code.

Richie said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

1GB = 1 billion bytes is a good move by Apple as they have been some pillocks trying to sue Apple over iPods when they seen less than the quoted GB value on the Mac/PC, not understanding storage devices and memory size is not calculated the same and this should make it easer for end users, programmers like my self know the true value and understand the two systems but users don't and this is why I think Apple has done the correct thing even though I quite liked seeing the true value and not a maketing value as that what this is at the end, a way to show a bigger value, Bytes is short for binary digit so when companies say we are quoting in decimal and quote ?MB how can it be digital if B stands for Bytes ?, and they also say MiB is the binary quote, ??? Mega Binary Binary Digits, eh you quote what you like we all know that MB = 1024K, 1K = 1024 Bytes, but public is dum so we programmers just let them be.

Es said on Wednesday, 02 September 2009

@Dan, The fact is true that the calculation has changed but haven't individual files changed sizes also? I mean if snow leopard now reads hard drives as they are marketed, doesn't that mean it reads individual files that way too, therefore they get bigger also?
Just wondering.

vader said on Monday, 07 September 2009

i got 11gb back! but not impressed with the speed, the finder and iphoto seem clunky...

Nick said on Thursday, 10 September 2009

All files sizes in Snow Leopard don't ring true. when you drag them into Toast for instance the real size is revealed. Very odd.

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