I've just checked my fresh install of Leopard on a MacBook Pro in the office. It's taking 14gig of disk space without anything extra on there. So that's a bit more than you're expecting I think.

The first thing is to customize the OS install and deselect the extra languages and printer drivers. Following that, don't install any of the iLife suite you don't want.

I don't think it is as easy to remove crud from an existing installation, but I'll be following this thread to learn how it's done - my computers can use some trim, too.

The hint about skipping the install of the iLife suit is good: GarageBand itself takes up (I think) 10GB for samples; you can deselect them on initial installation.

As for stripping down universal binaries, I hear Xslimmer (shareware, ugh) or DownSizer (freeware, available at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/downsizer.html) is good for that. Note that I don't use these kinds of system optimization tools, as you'll have to re-run it every time an OS update happens, plus I dare not predict what happens if apple should start checking signatures on applications that were downsized like this.

I'm also wondering if it's safe to remove Mail.app in its entirety.

I prefer Thunderbird as an email client because it's cross-platform and open source, but if Mail.app provides frameworks that are used by other applications removing it might not be such a good idea, even though it's nearly 300Mb in size on Leopard. (For the same reason: it might be a bad idea to remove Safari, even though I always tend to configure Macs with Firefox/Adblock/NoScript/SessionSaver instead -- how well abstracted from Safari is WebKit?)

I've found that Youpi Optimizer picked up a lot of stuff that Monolingual didn't. There's also Disk Inventory X, which doesn't actually free up any space but is a nice way to visualise how much is being taken up by what.

Failed the saving throw again?

Yes I'm just jealous. But I'd love to see some good answers here. My MBP needs to go on a diet.

Actually, Monolingual strips architectures too. Use this early on, because I seem to recall some vague disclaimer about various system utilities/libraries requiring their PPC code to function. Could just be under Tiger, but it'd suck to have to restart from scratch after 4-6 hours of slimming.

Also, both Mail & Safari (the applications themselves and anything inside ~/Library/{Preferences,Caches,Application Support}/ relating to those apps) can be pitched. The frameworks they build off of are safely housed in /System/Library if another app wants to link against them.

JDC: I spent thirteen weeks on the road last year, and twelve weeks the year before that. This year I expect to spend at least 10 and possibly 12 weeks.

I've tried small screens and keyboards. The Vaio TX3 served me through one and a half novels but I just about pounded it flat -- the keycaps have rubbed off and worn through to plastic, and the palm rest is permanently discoloured -- and the screens on gadgets like the Eee or Kohjinsha subnotebooks are simply too small for my now-aging eyes. I need a full-sized keyboard and screen. I also need something that weighs next to nothing because I get back/neck/shoulder ache if I carry a bag with a laptop around with me. Even my old 12" G4 Powerbook was too heavy -- the Macbook I'm typing this on is only feasible because of a rolling flight case (which tends to limit my freedom of movement).

I've looked at the MBA, and the criticisms thereof, and I don't think they're applicable to my needs. The lack of onboard ethernet can be fixed by buying the £20 ethernet dongle. With my 160Gb iPod Classic (which only currently holds about 60Gb of music) I'd have a Time Machine drive with some overflow storage, and I'm happy to use a tiny 20 gram/4-port USB hub and 30-gram 80-in-1 card reader when I need to plug in peripherals -- which only really happens when I'm working at a desk. I don't write when flying economy class, and for long-haul flights I tend to try and go business class, which means seatback power, which means no problem with battery life. The only real drawback is the SSD capacity (I want it because of the low latency and seek time -- it should boot from cold in under 12 seconds), and if I can squish OS/X, apps, and swap into under 10Gb -- the applications folder on this Macbook is a bloated 24Gb, without the iLife space hogs! -- I'll be happy.

Could you remove OSX entirely and run a lightweight Linux distro on it? Perhaps Xubuntu? OS X Leopard is a lovely bit of kit, but it does take up an enormous amount of room, and if you're throwing the $1000 extra that it costs for the SSD, every meg counts, and Xubuntu would do everything you wanted and more.

Ah, sorry, just saw that you're using other Mac products (and looking at Time Machine as a backup solution) which means OS X makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and I'd also like to say (if it weren't obvious already), Time Machine makes Leopard worth its weight in GB. Not to say your interest in slimming it down is unwarranted, I just think it's the feature-to-beat if you're going to consider replacing it with Linux outright.

Dave, I am indeed familiar with Xubuntu. (What do you think runs on the Vaio TX3?) I want application and file level portability, which is why I'm using Thunderbird/Firefox/(Open|Neo)Office for my actual work. But ... Linux support tends to lag somewhat on Mac hardware, and I'm betting that it's not going to be brilliant on the MBA for some time to come. Also, the Mac UI is rather nice and doesn't get in the way and comes with handy extras like TextKit; add MacPorts or Fink and you've got virtually everything a Linux gearhead needs to feel mostly at home. (Hell, boot to the non-graphical console, fire up X11, and you can even have Gnome or KDE as your desktop instead of Aqua! Although why you'd want to is another matter ...)

The NSA published this: http://www.nsa.gov/snac/os/applemac/osx_client_final_v_1_1.pdf for 10.3, it is mostly the same still for 10.5

Also You could use something like Pacifist to open the installer packages and remove all the junk.

Or MacOSXHints.com would have something useful.

If you're going Mac, can I heartily, heartily recommend Scrivener as a drafting tool? Exports everything in platform-independent text files, works with LaTeX and multi-markdown and all that jazz, super pretty and cheap as chips.

If you are truly going to use the system only for web browsing, email reading, and writing documents, do you really need more than 40 GB of storage space? What else are you using the system for?

In addition to the apps mentioned above, there's also the command line tool lipo, which looks like it should do what you want with the -thin option.

Some unordered thoughts:

Charlie @4: If I understand the way Mac OS X apps work, Webkit and whatever frameworks Mail.app uses/provides should be completely separate from the application bundles themselves (/Applications/Mail.app/, /Applications/Safari.app/, etc.). I believe the frameworks all live elsewhere (my 10.4 install has /System/Library/WebKit.framework/, for example), so removing the app bundles should free up the space without crippling anything else.

Another things to remove from a default install: Apple's Developer tools (which live under /Developer -- just trash the whole directory), unless you need X11.

(er, of course I meant 64GB not 64MB :P )

As for removing things "safely" -- usually in OS X, you just delete it. If it was necessary, of course, you're screwed, but it doesn't tend to punish you just for removing something "behind its back" (OS X is not a fan of "registries" and other such lists-of-installed-cruft -- it tends to just search for things, either find them or not, and if necessary cache the results and rebuild the cache if it detects out-of-sync).

I can't promise there aren't obscure corners of the OS that might care, but to give an example, I've found installing and removing device-drivers for highly-obscure $10 webcams is just a matter of copying the QT plugin to the right place, and deleting it again. While the system's running, and with no repercussions. (Well, unless you count the webcam's shonky image quality as a repercussion ;) )

No advice on slimming but from a money standpoint it might be worth sourcing the SSD yourself given that Apple is charging > 800 pounds for the upgrade. Or get it in the US where it's only $1300 more (and about 450 quid cheaper overall). OTOH, I cannot find the 1.8" 64GB SSD part for sale anywhere. Toshiba and Apple must have them locked up for now.

I hope you love it (for me, the no optical drive and, less so, no user changeable battery put it outside of things I even lust after). I cannot help but believe that next year's MBA will be something special. If they announce an MBA with an optical drive that I can tether to a 3G iPhone for data at a reasonable rate, I will start camping at the Apple store.

There is probably a wealth of information available from the lunatic fringe who install Leopard on their EEEs. If they can shoehorn it into 4GB w/ working space 64GB should be a walk in the park.

Re-install the moment you get it.

Do not install foreign languages.

Don't install printer drivers you don't need. (You can get away with not having any, if you're going to use a networked printer.)

Don't install the third-party applications, demo apps, etc.

Don't install iLife, or, at least, only install the portions you need.

Don't install the developer tools :).

Also... are you sure you can use an iPod as a Time Machine disk? I'm not so sure of that. (I could be wrong, of course.)

On the machines at the computer lab I worked at I saved a couple of gigs by deleting the libraries of templates that came with garageband, iDVD, iPhoto, iWeb and iMovie. Although I'm sure someone else has mentioned this already...

Yes, I am pretty sure you can get rid of Mail, but only do so after setting Tbird as your preferred mail client—which, perversely, you do from a preference inside Mail, or by hand-editing a plist file. Equally perversely, Safari controls your choice of web browser and RSS reader. But I don't think either one is required for any underlying libraries. The prudent thing would probably be to at least keep a zipped copy of these apps locally until you were sure everything was working OK. And clone a disk image of the hard drive in its pristine state.

You can trim away a lot of fonts, although that won't save you much space. Here's a good explanation of required fonts on OS X. I've also discovered it's quite easy to wind up with duplicates of fonts in different places.

Dashboard can be disabled and deleted. I'm not so comfortable with the Unix layer, but I imagine one could trim some of the stuff in /etc and /usr.

There's a lot of stuff in /Applications/Utilities that you'll never need, or will only need during setup.

First thing I do is nix the extra localizations that are installed by default. On Leopard this saved almost a gig of space. I used http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/.

You can strip universal binaries with Xslimmer. Not free, but I don't know of another tool that does it. You can also do this by hand by digging around in the bundle, but that's a bit hairy.

Note however that if you're going to be using MacPorts or Fink, you'll need to keep the Developer tools around.

To argue a countering point -- don't get the SSD. Yes, it looks cool, yes, someday, it'll be the right answer, but you're paying $990 USD for the option, and if the power savings were significant, you can bet Apple would be trumping that.

Get the 80GB disk, and suddenly you'll have 60GB of free storage, even with Crapware.

As to saving throws vs. shiny, it sound like there will be at least two of them at Eastercon... :-)

Assuming you're choosing an ultraportable notebook with the SSD to maximize usability and battery life while you're on the road, you may wish to consider a compromise. A kernel developer friend of mine with way more video ram than a console framebuffer requires has a few scripts which will create a ramdrive, copy some working files as needed and spin down the physical disk.

Of course with only 2GB of ram (and the videocard nibbling at that) it doesn't leave much room, and swap space becomes an issue if you don't have enough room to mkswap on the ramdisk (seems redundant I know).

Love to hear how you move ahead with this, as well as your thoughts on the Air once you've had your hands on it.

Just in case you are interested in doing this yourself:

$ pwd /Users/Shared/build/Release/MYAPP.app/Contents/MacOS $ lipo -info MYAPP Architectures in the fat file: MYAPP are: ppc i386 $ lipo -thin ppc MYAPP -output MYAPP1 $ lipo -info MYAPP1 Non-fat file: MYAPP 1 is architecture: ppc $ mv MYAPP1 MYAPP

I did test this on my PPC machine. It would be relatively easy to wrap this in a script or even AppleScript droplet, but would be a considerable amount of work to do it properly (with error checking and all the bells and whistles).

Apple often bundles trial versions with their releases; remove those and you're getting a fair bit of space back. Depending on your back, you might try a backpack for your heavier computer, rather than a one-sided shoulder case--those generally produce less back stress, though it depends on your back.

fishbane, you can use lipo to strip out the extra architectures. It's pretty easy to write a script that will look over every file on the system, using file(1) to determine if it's a Mach-O executable, and then use lipo to remove the other architectures. The problem is... which architectures do you remove? Most executables will be PPC and i386; some will be PPC, i386, PPC-64, and x8664. On an airbook, you can reliabliy remove the PPC-64 architecture -- that's NEVER going to be used in an executable on it, and you can remove it from the libraries if you're not developing. Removing PPC will mean you can't run any old applications -- this may or may not be an issue. Removing x8664 means you don't get to run any 64-bit apps, and x8664 is a big (performance) win in a lot of cases (since the x86 architecture is register starved, and x8664 doubles the number of registers). I am somewhat curious how much space this would save, but not enough to do it on a system :). I also think it would cause problems with software updates, and it may cause problems with pre-binding.

Erik V. Olson... I'm hearing that the SSD performance and battery life is pretty significant, but that's just talk at this point; I am expecting to hear some real numbers from Apple RSN.

Rather that hit the applications and frameworks one-by-one, you could run the whole thing through the mill with the ditto command-line tool:

but I haven't tried that, myself...

Note that just binning (for instance) GarageBand in the Applications folder still leaves lots of resources around. Apple doesn't have an un-install tool, probably because there's a risk of breaking things. However, applications that use Apple's Installer write a Bill of Materials (BOM) file into the /Library/Receipts folder... my old notes say:

I spent years running a very thin, minimal Linux system that I built from source. I (almost) knew what every file on the system was for. I can't do that on my Mac.

The Monolingual tool (mentioned above) will also strip unused architectures from Universal binaries for you. Read the FAQ first though - if you still want to use Rosetta for any reason on an Intel box then you have to be careful not to strip PPC forks from system frameworks.

Boyd @31: you can also use AppZapper(commercial), or AppTrap(free, OSS).

(Disclaimer: I got AppZapper out of a "x apps for $x " deal; I probably wouldn't bother with it standalone)

I'm hearing that the SSD performance and battery life is pretty significant

In terms of performance, it could be -- EMC is trumping their new 73GB and 146GB SSDs for their enterprise storage units, and the numbers are amazing -- 4500iops, as opposed to the 150iops for a 15K magnetic drive.

I really haven't heard anything about battery performance yet. If it was significant -- which I define as adding an hour or more to battery life -- then I'd be somewhat more interested. But truthfully, the number of times in my life where I've been working on the notebook and more than 5 hours from power is zero -- and I travel quite a bit, will do more this year, and do 2-4 intercontinental trips. I'll sacrifice 2-3 hours of work time on long internationals if it means I don't have to haul around an extra 2-3 pounds of notebook. Of course, the airlines I fly have power ports, so it hasn't come up yet.

Personally, I expect to swap in an SSD into my shiny new MacBook Air in a year or so. -- but I just don't see it being worth the premium right now, and SSDs are a little too bleeding edge for me.

I dunno the details, but I assume the SSD is just a bunch of flash chips. If that is the case then using a swapfile/swap partition on a SSD is a bad idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_flash#Limitations Swaping onto a flash chip will wear it out much faster. If you look at linux or bsd instructions for running on a flash backed disk, like on the eee pc, they run sans swap.

@34

I was concerned about the same thing, but a bit of web searching on "SSD swap wear" suggests that commercially available SSD products incorporate some serious wear-leveling algorithms that extend the per-block endurance.

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

The figure that caught my eye in that analysis was that given a 64GB disk, it would take 51 years to hit the endurance limit assuming a continuous write at the full speed of the interface.

The message there is that there's more to a good SSD than just slapping a bunch of flash down on board with a SATA interface. If those figures are really true then I'm no longer worried.

The developer tools can be slimmed down by removing the 1GB or more of documentation (/Developer/ADC Reference Library/) without removing the functionality you need for MacPorts or Fink. It's all on the web anyway.

Dave @12: Scrivener isn't cross-platform and isn't open source. That rules it out for me. (Added to which, I looked at it a while ago and it doesn't allow multiple windows on different parts of the same document -- an absolute necessity for my working style.)

Nick @36 and others: yes, leaving out the developer docs is probably a good idea.

lipo looks useful, too, in conjunction with find2pl and a custom perl script it should do what I want.

Sam @13: I usually carry about 5Gb of email archives around with me, about 1Gb of writings (including various intermediate drafts), scans of foul papers (another couple of Gb), and I hope (at some point) to scan my backlog of contracts (on dead tree, fill a six inch thick box file) to PDF for reference. That's why I reckon I need at least 10Gb for data relating to email and work ... and that's before you get into web browsing.

(And I'm not averse to sticking a copy of Falcon's Eye in a corner of a disk, even though the MBA isn't a gaming machine.)

I'm sure you have a good reason, Charlie, but can I ask a question?

Why?

If all you're doing is web/email/OOo, then what exactly do you need the space for?

And, to post a counterpoint -- the 80GB drive isn't a 2.5" drive, it's a 1.8" -- read, iPod -- drive. Thus, the SSD is likely to have significantly increased performance, thought given what the 1.8" drive was built for -- iPods -- the 1.8" should be low power draw and tough.

If that is the case then using a swapfile/swap partition on a SSD is a bad idea.

Between wear leveling and better flash -- we've increase the write cycles by a factor of four since 8MB flash chips came out -- they'll last as long as the notebook.

Besides, if you're using a MacBook Air, 2GB should be enough to keep you out of the swap file. If you really need to run Photoshop , or your favorite 3D rendered, or multiple compilers, or CAD/CAM all of the time, you really need to buy a different notebook. This is a email/word processing/spreadsheet/SSH/RDP/web machine. If you need a desktop replacement, you'd want a MacBook Pro, not a MacBook Air.

Micah: I listen to music while I write. I maybe need somewhere to offload photos from my digital camera when I travel. And I need contingency space. Clawing back spare gigabytes from bloatware is fun.

A Computer Fixer's View

Well, Mr. Stross, it's you're lucky day! I have the answer!

I have been fixing people's computers on and off for most of my adult life. I've fixed all kinds of PCs, from 8-bit micros to those horrid Mac Things. And with my decades of experience as a low-grade techie, I can finally and definetively answer your question, so here we go...

How to slim down an OS/X installation, by Andy.

What you do is, you spend as much time as possible trawling the boards and technical manuals for OS arcana, undocumented tweaks, and insider info. Also you should start asking people you meet in real life, until no-one will talk to you.

• When you have no friends, it's time to make some new ones, so get a job with Apple Computer. Climb your way up the corporate ladder, making sure to ask every single person you meet about the MacBook Air, OS/X and how it could be slimmed down. If it's at all possible, for maximum drama you should have an actual affair with a fellow employee, so that your wife leaves you and you completely ruin your life in order to become an expert on this particular operating system.

• Then, when you find yourself sitting on the board that designs OS/XI you will have got to the point where you know all there is to know about OS/X. So it's now time to fiddle around with the actual machine for hours and hours on end, deleting bits and bobs, whacking directories, and making adjustments to vital system files until eventually, the computer stops working.

• Finally, re-install the OS and repeat the last two steps until you get really annoyed, throw the stupid thing in the bin and go out and buy some more SSDs for your Asus EEE ;-D

Andy W: you missed my warning about platform advocacy, didn't you?

Consider this your final warning. KTHXBYE.

Uh? Wha'? Sorry!

is utterly mortified at having caused offence

Andy, I just get slightly annoyed at people who appear to respond to a blog posting without, ahem, reading it (and considering whether it addresses certain concerns of theirs in advance).

Call it a delayed after-effect of the great "space colonization: good idea, or religious lunacy?" thread.

Some more digging reveals ...

According to Low-End Mac, the hard disk in the Macbook Air is replacable (i.e. it's just plugged in via a standard connector, not soldered or anything weird), however it's a 1.8" diameter, 5mm-thick unit rather than the more common 8mm thick type (paging JPL, metric/imperial unit mismatch!). The article goes on to add: "At the Consumer Electronics Show this month, Samsung showed a 128 GB SSD in this form factor and says they'll start shipping it in the first half of this year." The Register seem to think the Samsung unit will be a 2.5" form factor but electronista had more detail and said it'll fit both 1.8" and 2.5" drive bays.

So I think I'll maybe end up buying the cheaper Macbook Air with the whizzy rotating 80Gb thing, then upgrade it to a 128Gb SSD when the warranty expires, by which time SSD prices will have fallen somewhat (so it should work out cheaper overall than buying the 64Gb SSD model at the outset).

Which means that I can be a little less obsessive about slimming the OS. Losing 14Gb out of 64 is a whole lot worse than losing 14Gb out of 80, after all.

The only remaining question is whether I can be bothered to wait long enough to get a build-to-order machine from Apple, with the 1.8GHz CPU and the hard disk (rather than the slower 1.6GHz CPU, which definitely won't be upgradable later).

I haven't ordered a Macbook Air because Apple are quoting 2-3 weeks until shipping, and I'm going to spend eight days in the middle of February in Boston. (Which means, by derivation from Murphy's law, that if I ordered one now they'd try to deliver it the day I go away.) However, I could really use one for travel, so if they show up in the shops more than 48 hours before I go, I'll buy a standard retail model on the spot. If not, I'll order a BTO for when I come back.

Hey Charles,

If you are going to Boston I would highly recommend buying you Mac Book Air from there it will be a hell of alot cheaper and all Apple laptops have an international warranty so you are covered no matter where you buy from. All you need to do is change the plug on the charger which should cost you no more than 20 pounds I think.

Either way it is a nice traveling laptop as for cutting down the OS the above comments are pretty spot on.

Pete: I'm watching the exchange rate. However, it's a business machine (it goes on the books as a business expense), and once you factor out the VAT on the UK price the differential isn't too huge. Am I prepared to pay a hunk extra to have £ and € keys? It all depends how much ...

LOL k fair enough on the tax front and it is easier for us in Australia as we don't need those pesky pound and euro keys to much :)

Speaking of keyboards... if you want your MBA with a Swiss keyboard, I can get you one with a discount.

Given the number of space Nazis and French seductresses featured in your novels, you might find having physical keys for ümläuts and àccénts a real advantage...

Am I prepared to pay a hunk extra to have £ and € keys? It all depends how much ...

Factor in the international plug kit -- though you might already have. (I traded my spare US plug to Dr. Plotka for his spare UK plug...)

Eric@37: Unfortunately there's a difference between the enterprise-level SSD interfaces and the ones used for single disks. While the single disks are certainly not inferior in performance to a conventional hard disk, neither do they blow them away in speed either.

I definately want to see battery life figures...

Out of my own curiosity, what will you be doing in Boston next month (I'm a student in the area).

Erik: I've already got the international plug kit for Apple magsafe power supplies. (The Macbook has been to Australia and Japan, as well as the USA ...)

Ben: I'll be at Boskone.

You're wanting programs and data to fit into your (always limited) laptop hard disk. Why?

I keep data separate fom my laptop and PDA when travelling, in SD cards or a pen drive. If the laptop bursts into flames or the PDA gets stolen then I can read the data on another loaner machine or even in an internet cafe if I have to.

Buy the 64Gb SSD Air, LEAVE IT ALONE! and keep all the extra garbage data (ten years of email archives? Why?) you cart around with you like a hermit crab on a couple of 16Gb or 32Gb pen drives in your pocket. That way when you have to send the Air back to Apple to get it fixed (and you know this will happen; it's too radical a design with a lot of engineering compromises) you don't lose the data too.

That garbage data is read-only -- old contracts, ten-year-old emails, old working drafts etc. It doesn't have to be live on the laptop, just be accessible in a short timeframe. You know it makes sense (but that won't stop you screwing around with bigger, more expensive SSDs when they come out...)

"Apple often bundles trial versions with their releases; remove those and you're getting a fair bit of space back. Depending on your back, you might try a backpack for your heavier computer, rather than a one-sided shoulder case--those generally produce less back stress, though it depends on your back."

Posted by: Randolph Fritz

This made me realize that Charlie is looking for hardware solutions when the real solution is software:

When you're in the USA, pick up a servant. They should be cheap, with the economy collapsing. Possibly an ex-realter, although the brain upgrade would be expensive.

Get a small one, which will fit into the overhead compartments. The servant can carry about all sorts of Apple goodness, as well as a printer, networking gear + 100 yards of Ethernet cable, a satellite dish - everything!

When you're leaving the USA, just put the servant into the recycling bin (marked 'Soylent Green').

Charlie—why do you use PDF for scanned documents, and not DjVu? (It's both a freer format, and from my experience has far better compression…)

servant

Likely idea; consider one of these: http://myherooftheday.com/?p=76

Hire in Europe; in the USA, qualified people are probably already all working for the federal airline luggage safety improvement examination system (or whatever it's called), the people who inspect your luggage while you're in the air.

Nah, seriously, buy the rotating thing and replace it with the memory card in a few years.

But ... you're going to buy a "1.0" level device from Apple?? Hope the hinges hold up.

nolaviz @60: maybe because I've never heard of DjVu before, and PDF is ubiquitous and cross-platform. (Note: I'm not confusing PDF with Adobe Acrobat.)

It's not that Monolingual strips the ability to type Arabic. It walks through applications removing selected localizations. Taking iPhoto '08 as an example:

nop$ du blah blah blah 169M /Applications/iPhoto.app 4.9M /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj 83M /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/.lproj nop$ basename -s .lproj /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/.lproj | fmt Dutch English French German Italian Japanese Spanish da fi ko no pl ptPT ru sv zhCN zh_TW

After running Monolingual, iPhoto will be (83M-4.9M) smaller, but you'll have lost the capability to file your photos using Korean menus and dialogs. Depending on how you run Monolingual, you may still be able to type the descriptions of your photos in Korean; I can, although my Hangeul production skill is about at the level of "cat-like typing detected".

Between stripping localizations and the elimination of i386 and ppc_64, I think I got back at least a gig or two on my G4 mini. YMMV. Oh, and printer drivers are huge, >1G hogs. So like the second comment says, a scratch install with minimal options is a good idea if possible.

Sir -

Just did the upgrade to Leopard for the wife, and according to Apple's Docs (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/11421.html) iPods iDisks can't be used for backups.

Sorry to be a bearer of bad news...

On a more positive note a group of Right Honorable Bastards recommend your books highly, and I look forward to reading them.

R.

I recommend taking a simpler approach. Buy the 64 GB SSD drive and load up the OS as you would normally. Let's say this leaves you with on 32 GB of usable space. Let's allocate 10 GB of space for your current email &c. That leaves you over 20 GB of extra space. This is still quite a bit of free disk space.

As you start scanning your contracts, keep an eye on your disk space. If and when you start using up more of the disk, then consider trimming the OS and upgrading your hard drive. You can also think about what files you actually need on your drive all of the time. Perhaps it's easier to buy a small portable 120 GB hard drive and throw it in your suitcase rather than a carry-on. This would cost less than $150. (Or you can spend more money for a pretty hard drive with encryption http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10978)

That being said, your point about upgrading the drive later is a very good one....

I don't know whether the stripping tools already handle this, but text-to-speech data is a good target. I saw a note that the "Alex" voice file in Leopard is 600 megabytes.

Yup:

bash-3.2# cd /System/Library/Speech/ bash-3.2# du -sk . 727036 . bash-3.2#

Re: unnecessary application resources and Universal binaries: Trimmit is a drag-and-drop implementation of several of the above suggestions at once. (I haven't used it, but there it is.)

OmniDiskSweeper from Omnigroup.

It's basically a user-friendly graphical 'du', in a column-browser display sorted from largest file or folder to smallest.

It's cheap, but registering only lets you use a delete button to zap files. If you don't register, you just need to use some other method of deleting a given file.

Make sure you don't install any printers you don't need. Those drivers are gigantic.

Don't forget that US customs might decide to confiscate the computer when you enter the country, in their ever-vigilant search for child porn.

It might make sense to keep a fairly bare install on the internal SSD, and keep most of your files on external drives, perhaps in encrypted disk images. Stash multiple copies about your bags and they'll probaby miss one.

Unless you just never bring it to the US, in which case

One last: disable safe sleep.

If safe sleep is enabled, you'll have a file on your computer (in the vm directory) that is the same size as the RAM. Disable it and you'll save 2 GB.

You really only need it for if the computer loses all power during sleep, but this becomes rather less likely with the unremovable battery.

Jon H: yes, I know about deep sleep, I don't need a commercial, graphical version of du(1) (hint: been using the UNIX command line since 1989), and not terribly worried about customs finding child porn on my laptop because I'm not big on any flavour of porn, much less illegal stuff; I'd be more worried about losing the use of the laptop for a while (and that's what backups are for).

NB: the HDD Macbook Air apparently uses a 5mm (slim profile) 1.8" diameter hard disk with a standard interface (some form of SATA, IIRC). Samsung have pre-announced a 128Gb FLASH SSD in exactly this form factor, shipping "by July". So it would appear that the smart thing to do would be to buy a (cheaper) HDD Macbook Air, then upgrade the hard disk after the warranty cover expires. The only question is whether to get the standard 1.6GHz model or a build-to-order with the 1.8GHz CPU and a hard disk (which will take somewhat longer).

And to those who think it's an underpowered machine, all I can say is: after putting up with the 1.06GHz Core Solo in my current notebook for a while, anything feels like a speed demon.

It sounds like you're going to want to wipe and reinstall when you get the machine: Apple likes to fill the disk with iLife (which it sounds like you don't plan to use) and trials for iWork, MS Office and anything else they can cram on.

The above comment re: OmniDiskSweeper is probably the best, but du works well too :) I like ODS because I can delete the crap from the interface and I'm lazy.

Obv. install as few printer drivers, languages, etc.

There are a bunch of apps out there (I recall seeing them last year when my old MacBook's disk was getting full) that will "DeFat" your binaries: Stripping out the PowerPC support, which supposedly frees up a lot of disk space.

You may also find the disk full of crap like 4 gigs of samples for GarageBand when you start digging into where your disk space has gone.

Should you install the developer tools [which you'll need for GCC, etc], skip the documentation and anything else you can avoid: it eats up a few gigs of disk space on it's own.

I'm also told by lots of people who may or may not know better that journaled filesystems on SSD disks are bad. The reasoning I was given is that they require a LOT more reading and writing from disk [which is true] and shorten your SSD drive's life. I did some benchmarks on my EeePC and non-journaled is faster albeit much less safer. Mac OS does have an option to initialize & format a disk non-journaled.

Macrumors.com is reporting that the Samsung 128GB SSD is a SATA drive. However, MacBook Air uses PATA.

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/30/maximum-macbook-air-drive-80gb-for-now/

If they're right, you may not be able to swap in the 128GB SSD when you want to.

Meanwhile, here are some ideas for Apple's product managers to consider in. re the Macbook Air:

While I'm on the subject of travel and electronics:

There are two indispensible gizmos I keep in my travel kit. One is a four port USB 2.0 hub the size of a toothbrush handle. It weighs 15 grams (half an ounce), has four ports side-by-side in a row, and a very short cable. It's an I-can't-live-without-it gizmo, simply because the designers pared it down to nearly the minimum possible size and didn't ship it with a metre-long cable: ten centimetres is fine if all you want is a mobile port extender.

The other gadget is a four socket two-pin (US/Japanese style) power strip. It's 15 centimetres long, two centimetres thick, three centimetres wide, made of lightweight plastic -- it's about 50 grams. What makes it unique is that it doesn't have a cable. Instead, it has a two pin plug recessed inside it at one end. You then buy a US/Japanese extension cable (plug at one end, socket at the other) and slide the socket over the recessed plug. It then turns into a four-way extension bar. I bought mine in Japan (from MUJI, of course) with a fifteen centimetre cable. (They were selling 3M cables as well, but I didn't need the extra bulk.) On its own, the 15cm extension cable is great for plumbing power bricks with built-in plugs into inconveniently recessed airline power sockets. But with the 4-way bar, it's a life-saver for hotel rooms underendowed with power sockets. And it weighs under 50 grams, including the cable.

It's odd, but I never saw anything like this in an electronics shop in the US -- power extensions are common enough, but they all seem to have heavy plastic cases and on/off switches and surge suppressors, because they're designed for home/office use, not for the frequent flyer who wants stripped-down, tiny and lightweight.

Charlie wrote: Jon H: yes, I know about deep sleep, I don't need a commercial, graphical version of du(1) (hint: been using the UNIX command line since 1989),

Yeah, I figured you were familiar with du, I just find ODS easier to use because of the way it bubbles the most bloated files and directories to the top, making them easier to find.

and not terribly worried about customs finding child porn on my laptop because I'm not big on any flavour of porn, much less illegal stuff; I'd be more worried about losing the use of the laptop for a while (and that's what backups are for).

Also, I didn't think you'd have the porn, but you know how US officials assume everyone's guilty and if they haven't found the good then they just haven't looked long enough.

My thinking was that if the laptop had a minimal install on it, and looked new, it would be easy to convince customs that nothing is on it so they'd let you go on.

(Hm. For bigger hard disks maybe the trick would be to partition the drive and set the boot partition to be a copy of a Leopard install DVD, set up to launch into the 'welcome' animation... "It's brand new, mr TSA.")

Jon H: I gather that these days the cops cart away all the electronic storage media from a house if they consider the occupant to be a subject of interest. And then they have to scour everything.

I can live without the headaches, but if they ever raid me, I am going to indulge in some schadenfreude for the poor bastards who have to verify whether there's any data worth reading on the 20-year-old stringyfloppies for the ICL One Per Desk, or if indeed there's a partition at all on the ext2-formatted CF card I used to boot Linux on a Psion 5MX. There is a Windows box in the flat, as it happens -- a Kohjinsha SH6 subnotebook with a Japanese keyboard -- but everything else (and at last count there were two desktops, six notebooks, a dozen or so PDAs/smartphones/internet tablets, half a dozen iPods -- some in use as data storage devices with weird filesystems -- ten or more external hard drives, and probably a dozen or more memory cards) is Terra Incognita to a Windows data recovery expert.

NB: in case you were all wondering whether the lusting after a Macbook Air was solely because Charlie has lost his saving throw vs SHINY! again ... my previous subnotebook workhorse, a Vaio TX, has been hammered into a smoking hole in the ground. Meanwhile, the Asus Eee is working, and has been tailored into a suitable workhorse (by the addition of bluetooth, a 16Gb SD card, the installation of a Xubuntu derivative with a patched kernel, and the addition of a Think Outside bluetooth keyboard an mouse) ... at which point, with all the extras it weighs more than a Macbook Air, takes up more space, and costs twice as much as a stock Eee, while still having a poky little screen and a wimp of a processor. And a worse battery life. And the obvious alternatives to the Macbook Air are either vapourware (Lenovo X300) or come from Sony (with the consequential shitty lack of support) and actually cost more than the Apple equivalent.

I ought to have learned by now that I just can't win. Maybe I should just tithe St. Steve of Jobs a tenth of my income in perpetuity in return for a stream of shiny gadgets that are ergonomically ahead of the competition ...

This'll probably get held up for moderation cuz it's mostly just a big fat link, but...

There's a teardown of the MacBook Air, which might give some clue as to how practical HDD replacement will be. As well as being nerdtastic, of course.

Hi Charlie, I'm not sure if my comments will violate your no-advocacy ban, as I'm not really advocating any brand. BUT what I will say is you need to be very careful about buying the first version of any Mac laptop. All Macheads know this (it's even near religious with many of them). I assume your experience with the 12 inch PB was good, but as an early adopter, I can tell you I had to get it sent in twice and the third time the problem was manageable, so I didn't even bother. With an early MacBook, I had to get if fixed twice within the first 6 months (random shutdowns and some unexpected logic board failure) and now I'm starting to learn about the case-cracking problem (at least I waited long enough to avoid the case discoloration problems with the very first MB).

Overall, I'm very happy with my Apple experience, but I would have been a lot happier if I had just waited until later revisions. Right now I know people who are still living with the "moo-ing" problem with the MacBook Pro...that's apparently fixed in the later revisions. But at least Apple eventually fixed the whole overheating thing, although it took a while.

Since from your post, you sound like a guy who needs no hassles and something very solid and reliable, I would recommend that no matter how tempting it seems, wait until at least the next revision.

So. I'm in the same boat as you (though I hack Perl rather than prose). The nice lady from FedEx showed up at my door with a 64G MacBook Air this morning.
I promptly applied some of the earlier posters' suggestions. The monolingual/xslimmer saved me about a gig off the 18G taken up by the default install. Which...didn't really wow me. I wiped and reinstalled, being careful not to let the install CDs give me my free copy of iLife, Asian fonts or printer drivers for everything under the sun. Once I added in X11 and the slimmest Xcode that would get me a compiler and svk, I found myself with a fully installed system that took up 11G. It's not amazing, but the additional gig or two I can get with judicious trimming of help files and libraries isn't quite worth it to me.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/xslimmer.html

You might want to check this one out. Supposedly removes bits of applications as well as localizations from your system.