In both cases, you can remove installed software to further free up disk space. But here’s the detail, with the first number expressed in Windows- and pre-Snow Leopard style Base 2 calculations and the second number in billions of bytes: The picture I published at the top of this post tells this story better than words and numbers. So how much free space is really left on either of these “128 GB” devices? In the chart, I have also relabeled the blue blocks as 'System reserved' to avoid confusion over their proper purpose.Ĥ. In any case, when expressed in Base 2 terms, the amount is going to be in the mid- to high-90 GB range. Differences could be due to Lion versus Mountain Lion, updates to iLife, or different flash memory parts. The 99 billion bytes figure I used was from a MacBook Air owner who was reporting details in late 2012. Other reports from a few months ago show 103-104 billion bytes available. One reader reports that the most recent MacBook Air provides 106.87 billion bytes (99.5 GB in Base 2) of user-available storage out of the box. Over time, it has steadily improved the efficiency of builds of OS X. But Apple has produced many MacBook Airs in the more than four years of the products life.

Update: There's only one Surface Pro, which makes measurements easy. I originally used that figure as the basis of all calculations here. I don’t have a MacBook Air to do the same calculation, but I confirmed from several online sources that the available disk space on a new, 2012-model MacBook Air is approximately 99 GB. I was able to confirm the amount of disk space used for Windows and included apps in a base configuration of the Surface Pro 128. But one big difference is that the Windows 8 Recovery partition can be transferred to a USB flash drive and the disk space can be reclaimed.įinally, there’s the OS and the apps that are included as part of a standard configuration.

On the Surface Pro 128, the EFI and Recovery partitions add up to 8.61 GB.

How to free up disk space macbook air