Even with 1TB disk space I'm resentful of the amount of space "leaked" by software. Maybe I'm a naz-, maybe I was born in the MB era.. can't say. The other day I booted a P3 era machine and seeing all we did with "just" 128MB made me feel chills all over.
I blame the perpetual-beta mentality along with lazy development practices.
Used to be, we specced out exactly what was in a release and no more. Now, it's just whatever they can cram in under a deadline without all that "unnecessary" optimization.
I'm probably as guilty as anyone else; I like getting a paycheck and so I keep my mouth shut, even though shit like that literally keeps me up some nights.
I see a few reasons: less compiled languages, more abstractions, more best practices, that means a lot of libs. I've seen Wirth pascal compiler, it's two files of a few hundreds of lines, but it's not decoupled in any way. Today most programs are larger than this because they compose lots of rules. It also brings false laziness, since you're not used to write short code, well you don't.
My girlfriend was given a macbook air by her parents, and after OS and her normal programs were installed (office, chrome and not much else) she was left with 5G. 64G SSDs were common not very long ago, disk space for operational components is increasing.
Perhaps. But my 128GB circa-2011 Macbook Air daily-driver is constantly full. As is my 256GB Macbook Pro work computer which has a 60GB Win7 VM just for running the VMware fat client and some Hitachi software.
With 500+GB I wouldn't care, because the media (photos/movies/etc) need to be stored elsewhere regardless.