I have the exact same machine, 2011 MacBook Air, and it's always bloody out of disk space. It's the only machine I am constantly shuffling data around on. Delete photo library so I can upgrade xcode, let it resync from icloud next time I feel like having my photo stream.

Can't use it to offload and edit photos while traveling, despite the convenient SD card slot, because the disk is too small.

can't download an os update, disk full. And no, I'm not a gamer. I've been fighting that small disk for at least the past 4 years.

You can at least upgrade the storage on that era Airs, and in the last couple of years there are now adaptor cards for normal M2 SATA drives.

> 2011 MacBook Air, and it's always bloody out of disk space

Obviously it depends what you do with it. A 1.5tb HDD can fill up on a week under some use cases, so it is silly to mention that yours fills up. The fact that some people can use it and it doesn't full up means it is still a viable option.

Obviously.

It doesn't change the fact that an OS install and updates take up a significant percentage of that 128GB, whereas they take up an utterly negligible percentage of a 1.5TB disk.

I think the reason it works well for me is that I don't keep any photos on the machine except for the ones I'm using in Photoshop on current projects. And even then they're on a teeny weeny USB that barely sticks out of the side, and doubles the storage.

Counter counter point, my 128gb 2013 mbp I use for development has 90gb of “system” cruft somehow and I regularly have to shuffle files around, and have been thinking I need to re-image it since I can’t dig deeper into what the “system” bucket is made up of easily.

I discovered that the Chrome browser had been storing every previous version as it updated them. I had over 20 GB of old versions of Chrome, which I recovered when I deleted them.

GrandPerspective does it for me. Really intuitive interface to figure out what's taking how much of storage and delete it.

I have the exact same issue. I have 256gb in my MBP, but 162gb are used by system files. I can't seem to figure out what is being used and how to clear it out.

I’ve been very happy with Daisy Disk over the years.

https://daisydiskapp.com/

Omni Disk Sweeper is free and works pretty well: https://www.omnigroup.com/more

https://whatsizemac.com - been invaluable over the years with my 256GB 2012 MBA.