Before you sell a Mac: the order that leaves nothing behind
Erasing the disk is the last step, not the first. What to sign out of first, why the order matters, and what a wipe does not cover.
830 guides
Mac storage, explained.
What fills your disk, where it hides, and what is safe to remove. Every guide gives you a way to check it on your own Mac.
The update needs more space than it says, and here is why
An update needs room to download, unpack and apply at once. What the real requirement is, and the fastest gigabytes when you are short.
How to live with a 256 GB Mac without fighting it every week
A small drive is workable with four decisions made once. What to keep local, what to stream, and where the space always goes on a small Mac.
Why your Mac fills up faster than you put anything on it
Why Mac storage keeps filling up after you delete things: snapshots, caches, iCloud downloads and Recently Deleted, and how to find which one it is.
Homebrew installs more than you asked for, and keeps it all
The packages you installed pull in dependencies that stay after you remove them. What brew autoremove finds, and where the rest of the size is.
Steam keeps shader caches and downloads long after the game is gone
How much space Steam takes on a Mac, where games are stored, how to check it in Steam, and the shader caches and downloads uninstalling leaves behind.
Adobe's caches are larger than the applications, and there are four
Media caches, previews, autosaves and installer files accumulate across every Adobe app. Which are safe to clear and the settings that cap them.
Zoom's recordings folder is the one nobody remembers
Local recordings are saved to your Documents folder at full size and never cleaned up. Where they are, plus the caches around them.
Apple Music keeps downloads, and the library keeps everything else
Downloaded tracks, the media folder and years of imported files are three different things. How to see which is large and remove only what you meant to.
Podcasts downloads every episode, and TV keeps what you watched
Two Apple apps download in the background by default. Where the files are, the settings that cap them, and how much a year of each is worth.
Flutter downloads a toolchain per channel and keeps every build
The SDK, the pub cache and each project's build folder all grow separately. Which command clears which, and what a channel switch costs you.
.NET keeps every SDK you installed and every package you restored
SDKs are about a gigabyte each and nothing removes the old ones. Where the package caches are, and the command that clears all of them.