I was excited about this upgrade, because I love the notion that the people who released it care about optimizing the performance of my system. One of the optimizations I looked forward to was reclaiming over 6 GB of disk space after the upgrade (see Bertrand Serlet's announcement at 00:20:48 to 00:21:11 in the WWDC 2009 keynote video).
Lots of people in the Twittersphere were excited about the space savings, too. Before I upgraded, I checked to see what people were tweeting, just to make sure I wasn't about to walk off a cliff. Many people mentioned tremendous disk space savings that were well in excess of the 6 GB that Apple promised. Pretty exciting.
We have two Mac computers. Here's how the savings went for us:
Mac #1 10.5 10.6 SavingsSo, ...wow, we saved over twice as much space as Apple had advertised. But there's a curiosity in the numbers. Do you see it? How did my total capacity get bigger as the result of a software upgrade? The answer is that my capacity didn't really get bigger; it's just that Apple now measures disk space differently in 10.6.
------- --------- --------- ---------
Total 148.73 GB 159.70 GB
Free 47.70 GB 59.71 GB 12.01 GB
Mac #2 10.5 10.6 Savings
------- --------- --------- ---------
Total 185.99 GB 199.71 GB
Free 68.66 GB 83.95 GB 15.29 GB
I knew this was coming because of this article called "Snow Leopard's New Math." Snow Leopard still uses the abbreviation "GB" to refer, now, to 109 bytes, whereas, before, Leopard used the abbreviation "GB" to refer to 230 bytes. The problem, see, is that 109 ≠ 230. In fact, 230 is bigger. So in Snow Leopard, Apple is dividing by a smaller unit than it used to, which results in disk capacities and file sizes looking bigger than they used to. (Here's a good article about that.)
It is misleading that Apple used the same abbreviation—"GB"—to refer to two different units of measure. However, Apple is well justified in using "GB" in Snow Leopard. IEEE 1541-2002 says the right abbreviations would have been "GiB" (gibibytes) in 10.5 and "GB" (gigabytes) in 10.6. By that standard, Snow Leopard is right, and Leopard was wrong. All's well that ends well, I suppose.
Now, back to the space savings question. How much space did I really save when I upgraded to Snow Leopard? To answer that, I need to convert one of the two columns in my analysis (labeled "10.5" and "10.6") to the other column's unit, so I can subtract. Since when I watched the WWDC keynote film, my mindset was of 10.5-style "gigabytes" (properly gibibytes), I'll convert to GiB. Here's the answer:
Mac #1 10.5 10.6 SavingsThat's still spectacular, and I'm plenty happy with it. I have basically bought a whole bunch of performance enhancements and 17 GiB of disk space for $49 plus tax (I bought the Snow Leopard upgrade family pack). I think that's a pretty good deal.
------- ---------- ---------- ---------
Total 148.73 GiB 148.73 GiB
Free 47.70 GiB 55.61 GiB 7.91 GiB
Mac #2 10.5 10.6 Savings
------- ---------- ---------- ---------
Total 185.99 GiB 185.99 GiB
Free 68.66 GiB 78.18 GiB 9.52 GiB
This whole story reminded me of the old days when I used to install Oracle for a living. People would buy, say, a brand-new 100,000,000-byte disk drive and then be upset when the df utility showed considerably less than 100 "MB" of free space. Part of the explanation was that df reported in mibibytes, not millions of bytes.
It's interesting to note that in Snow Leopard, df -h now reports in Bi/Ki/Mi/Gi units, and df -H reports in B/K/M/G units (defined as IEEE 1541 defines them). Smart.
