Not trying to sound like a dork, but 9 GB -- that's nothing.
MacOS routinely eats 30-40 GB of HD space in Volumes/Preboot and "macOS Install Data" for god knows what. Plus even a bare bones XCode installation will cost around 20 GB, much more if you actually want to run your code on connected devices.
But of course saving disk space is not exactly #1 on Apple's priority list when the 512 GB and 1 TB disk upgrades sell at 80% margin.
Even 1TB isn't enough for me these days, especially since Lightroom requires your catalog be on your boot disk.
But 2TB and 4TB upgrades, in addition to a cost of I think $400/$800 respectively, require you move up a CPU model as well - a HUGE increase in cost that most users can't justify through improved performance.
Depedns on the use case. As someone using all 3 major desktop operating systems regularily, guess which one is my choice for performance critical, rugged, cheap applications.
And before someone says that mjcrosoft doesn't go after that space: a lot of ticket automats, ATMs, Kiosk displays etc. run Windows under the hood. And 9GB times the amount of devices out there are a lot of gigabytes someone has to pay.
And even if for that usecase there is a special slimmed down version of the OS one could argue that they would profit from their main desktop OS and their main embedded OS not drifting apart.
There's a subdirectory in the Windows folder (WinSxS) that can easily eat up 50+GB and deleting files there or in the Installer subdirectory can easily break things like updating any Adobe products you might have installed (which I've experienced directly and seen plenty of reports about online). 9GB is a joke and so is that article.
WinSxS (introduced with NT6.0, Vista) is the component store. It stores most of system files which are versioned and it's what solved DLL hell. Files in other system folders are hardlinks to them.
On my 1 year old install, it's 9GB with only 4GB allocated i.e. with no hardlinks outside WinSxS. So delete stuff outside instead of messing up with this folder.
I agree. I don’t run Windows, but even a relatively cheap laptop will have a 1tb disk. It seems silly to worry too much about an extra 9 gigs used by the OS.
MacOS routinely eats 30-40 GB of HD space in Volumes/Preboot and "macOS Install Data" for god knows what. Plus even a bare bones XCode installation will cost around 20 GB, much more if you actually want to run your code on connected devices.
But of course saving disk space is not exactly #1 on Apple's priority list when the 512 GB and 1 TB disk upgrades sell at 80% margin.