The system data issue on macOS is awful.

I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two.

Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations.

One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every other free message service that exists has no problem doing that.

This one drives me nuts. Not just on Mac, also on iPhone/iPad. It's 2026, and 5G is the killer feature advertised everywhere. There's no reason to default to downloading gigabytes of audio files if they could be streamed with no issue whatsoever.

I had the same problem but with a bad time machine backup. ~300GB of my 512GB disk, just labeled the generic "System Data". I lost a day of work over it because I couldn't do Xcode builds and had to do a deep dive into what was going on.

This seems to be a recent popular tool to handle this - https://github.com/tw93/Mole

I also prompt warp/gemini cli to identify unnecessary cache and similar data and delete them

> Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB

That's one way to drive sales for higher priced SSDs in Apple products. I'm pretty sure that that sort of move shows up as a real blip on Apple's books.

Suprisingly Claude is amazing at cleaning up your macbook. Tried, works like a charm.

Someone actually still uses the built-in podcasts app?

My WinSxS folder is 17Gb