[Cthulhu_]

Poring over the raw files, basically, looking for patterns / strings / etc that might be interesting; I'd argue that it's a bit easier for older operating systems as the modern ones are much, much bigger (MacOS 8 which was on the PowerMac G3 used in the article was 120 MB, MacOS 11 requires something like 35 GB.

But I suppose also there's less fun allowed, the article mentions this easter egg was removed in 1997 when Jobs returned.

[classichasclass]

A few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating system.

[grishka]

A lot of the size of the modern operating systems comes from two things:

- modern screens are higher resolution, and so require much larger image resources.

- modern OSes contain all translations in them. In the 90s it was common to have language-specific versions that only contain that language and maybe English.

In the specific case of macOS, it also contains double the code it needs because it runs on both x86 and ARM.

[mschuster91]

Add a third thing: AI models. That's going to get more and more obnoxious over the next years.

I just did a "ncdu -x --exclude Volumes --exclude Users /" on my 15.5 (side rant: why the hell is the exclusion necessary to prevent ncdu going into an infinite recursion loop? -x should keep it on the same filesystem, no crossing mountpoints)... and well.

800 MB in printer drivers (/Library/Printers), 425 MB in audio loops (/Library/Audio/Apple Loops), probably 500 MB in various AI models in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks (/MediaAnalysis.framework, /CoreSceneUnderstanding.framework, /CVNLP.framework, /TextRecognition.framework, /CoreHandwriting.framework), around 2 GB of other AI models in /System/Library/AssetsV2 (/com_apple_MobileAsset_LinguisticData, /com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_Siri_Understanding, /com_apple_MobileAsset_Trial_Siri_SiriTextToSpeech), 800 MB in /System/Library/LinguisticData, a whopping 550 MB in fonts in /System/Library/Fonts (of which Apple Color Emoji.ttc alone consumes 180 MB of data?!).

So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy. I mean, props to Apple for offering local models that work without internet, that's far from a given these days (sad enough). But the lowest-spec MBA clocks in at 256 GB disk space... having to waste 1% on AI alone and more on all the other stuff? That's ridiculous.

[Someone]

> So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy

I don’t think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB

> having to waste 1% on AI alone

Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.

Same for some other stuff, I think. /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.

[mschuster91]

> I don’t think 2.5 GB is a lot nowadays. Xcode is over 12 GB, iMovie over 4 GB, MS Word 2 over GB

Word is ridiculous, agreed. Xcode isn't mandatory (although I'd LOVE to have it ship without tons of mandatory SDKs, emulators and god knows what else makes up the 12 GB) and I'm not sure if iMovie is.

> Is that ‘having to’? I thought those models only get downloaded after you give permission to do so.

I can't remember having ever given macOS the permission to install Siri and the likes.

> /Library/Printers is 12 MB on my system, for example and /Library/Audio 584 kB.

Indeed, tried on another machine, no printer drivers there. Probably the culprit is HP, their drivers suck balls. /Library/Audio however, that's just the same size on my M2 MBA as it is on my 2019 MBP.

[saagarjha]

Firmlinks.

[BenjiWiebe]

I think I disagree with you on both of those points.

On Windows, you typically have to install language packs to get more languages.

Also, how many image resources does Windows-the-OS have, and how large are they? There are some, but the largest I can think of right off are the device icons in the hardware & printers screen. And most of those get installed later since they are part of the driver.

[philistine]

macOS contains all languages at boot. You do not need to download anything to switch from English to Japanese. What makes macOS so big these days are the large language models of Apple Intelligence.