Until last week, Garrett Murray hadn’t done a clean install of OS X since Tiger shipped in 2005:
That OS X made it so simple and safe to upgrade to each major release, and that Macs made it so simple to clone the entire filesystem onto an entirely new machine was a godsend for computing. But it also made me 100% unwilling to start over. That is, until I started doing it this week and realized just how much bloat there was:
- 215 apps in my Applications folder, over 140 of which I hadn’t used in as long as I could remember
- 400MB of content in ~/Documents, not a single bit of which was anything I wanted or needed, including five years of iChat transcripts
- Freelance client work from 2002 (!)
- 18 PrefPanes, only three of which I had touched in recent memory
- 26 Login Items, some of which I didn’t even recognize and had to research
- Three versions of the Apple Developer tools, including Xcode 3, Xcode 4 beta (ugh, seriously?) and Xcode 4
- A complete user account I used to use for presentations at conferences with random junk all over the desktop