One thing that I noticed right off the bat with this MacBook Pro is the disc space: even though this laptop has 20GB more disc space than my previous model, the free space was the same. Something was taking up a huge amount of space on the disc.
I haven’t finished looking for all the culprits, but one significant waste of space turned up: localized applications.
On the Mac, applications store all the resources they need for different languages — menus, images, etc. — inside the applications themselves. And every app that ships with the MacBook includes every language, built in. This results in some pretty bloated file sizes. For instance, iWeb weighs in at about 600MB.
Luckily, you can reclaim a decent amount of space by removing the languages you won’t be using. There’s little point in giving over disc space on the off chance that you might learn Dutch and want to run iPhoto in that language. Here’s how to remove the extra languages: choose the application and then choose “Get Info” from the file menu. Expand the “Languages” pane at the bottom of the info window, and remove the languages you don’t want using the “Remove…” button.
I did this for all the apps on my MacBook, and gained a little more than a gigabyte of space! The aforementioned iWeb app slimmed down from 600MB to 100MB.
Note, however, that Microsoft — of course — makes it annoying. The localized help files inside the Windows Media Player software are all locked, and can’t be deleted. You’ll have to open the trash and unlock the files. (Quick and easy tip, since this is a Mac: select all in the folder containing the locked files, hold down the option key, then choose “Inspector” from the File menu. Then when you uncheck the “Locked” checkbox, all the selected files will be unlocked.)
Just FYI: the largest single disc hog on the MacBook Pro (as shipped) seems to be the /Library folder. It takes up nearly 10GB. Big items in this folder include support for Garageband and iDVD, both of which include audio and video files. If you don’t intend to use these apps, be sure to delete their support folders in /Library/Appllication Support to save a ton of disc space. You’ll find more disc hogs for these apps in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops.
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