"I think we need a bigger Mac . . ."

Almost every day I meet people with the same complaint.

That time caught up with them.

It’s like the day you send your child off to college. Or you get your first AARP membership offer. People just give you a senior discount and you didn’t even ask.

It’s the day you thought would never come.

The day you ran out of space on your computer’s hard drive.

For most of us, picking the right-sized home is easier than choosing an adequate hard drive. Our digital data, after all, is without weight or dimension. It’s just there when we want it, so we tend to think of our computer hard drives like Newt Scamander’s magical suitcase - able to hold an entire world of treasures without a problem.

Having enough computer storage has always been a concern, but it’s come to the forefront in recent years because of some major Mac redesigns.

The magic number is somewhere between 2012 and 2015 with the rise of the Retina displays and Apple’s switch to solid state memory modules. These were seductive machines with stellar performance.

And thin.

Led by the MacBook Air, the whole MacBook line slimmed down to the thickness of a battery, keyboard and display, no longer limited by the size of a spinning hard drive. They were cool devices, and still are.

The thing is that the solid state drives (SSD) are expensive, far more per gigabyte of storage than a spinning hard drive (HD), so the temptation was to save money on a new Mac by going with a small sized SSD.

How much storage is enough?

On base models that was mostly 128GB. Barely enough for a road warrior who lived on the internet and never took photos. A bump to 256GB was $200 and 512GB was another $200. So a base MacBook Air ($999) plus decent storage ($400) became a $1500+ purchase with accessories, AppleCare, and taxes; the SSD storage taking up almost one third of the cost.

It’s no wonder that so many buyers opted to go with the smaller SSD’s just to save money. But now they've run out of space on an otherwise nice, usable Mac and have no way to upgrade it, other than carrying around an external hard drive.

It used to be that desktop Macs had an easier time of it because you were tied to a desk anyway. Having one or two hard drives sitting behind your iMac on the desk wasn't that big a deal.

And it still isn't, really. But there's a hitch.

As of this month, all the Macs that Apple sells sport the Apple Silicon System-on-Chip (SOC) and Apple's own File System (APFS). The combination of the new chip and the file system give blazingly good performance and stability.

But as it happens, some of that speed and efficiency is because the SOC and file system borrow some of your SSD storage space to stash recently used files for quick access. It's called "caching" and it shows up as "purgeable" space on the SSD specs.

Which means that if you try to add a file that needs that space, the system will delete some of the files being held in cache. These are copies, mind you, so you don't lose anything, and you probably won't feel much difference in performance, but what it does do is give confusing space stats. Sometimes "free space" is quoted to include the purgeable space and sometimes not.

That purgeable space, by the way, is on your Mac's internal drive, so desktop users won't escape it by plugging in external hard drives.

And that brings us back to how much storage space do you need?

On-board storage size is more important for a portable than for desktop Macs.

I used to advise upgrading to 2X the storage you are actually using on your old Mac. Now that we're kind of buying storage for ourselves and our new Mac, I'm thinking that 3X is a smarter target. For most of us that's likely 3TB or more. 2TB if we're diligent about clearing off all the clutter.

I know, I know. That's a fair bit of change for something that doesn't appear to make much difference right out of the box. A $600 add-on for 2TB storage on the base 14" MacBook Pro and an additional $800 with the new 15" MacBook Air.

But here's the thing, Apple builds great computers and they last. A 5 year useful life is a given, and 7 to 10 is not unheard of. So that $800 2TB drive in the MacBook Air costs about $13 per month over a 5 year lifetime. Just $10 per month on the MacBook Pro. The price of a couple mocha latte's.

My point is that with some forethought and careful planning, that day may never come when you run out of space and can't download/install/import/load/or otherwise use that really cool paperweight that used to do everything.

Just for lack of the space to do it.

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