From a post in my RSS feed talking about the explosion in application size:
Users are disrespected by increasing and surprising bloat in applications. For work, I need to run the Microsoft OneDrive client on one of my Macs, and I was surprised to see that it recently crossed the 1 GB threshold. This is a file syncing utility. For comparison — and you can check this for yourself — it was 70 MB just four years ago.
I verified this on my own machine:
Again, from the article:
I am not being dramatic when I call this sort of behaviour disrespectful; it shows contempt for users to eat up a full gigabyte of disk space for a background application that uploads and downloads files. OneDrive is obviously not the only offender — all Electron apps are needlessly bloated by bundling a discrete copy of Chromium, of course, and Adobe’s creative applications are several gigabytes each. But OneDrive is a grotesque example of needless bytes.
So – software installation footprints have dramatically grown in size and our own personal data, particularly photos, has now been accumulating in cloud storage for over a decade.
I think we’ve reset our own expectations of what the minimum storage on our machines should be. I upgraded my 2012 unibody Macbook Pro storage to 1TB a few years ago and it seemed lavishly excessive. When I (finally) bought a new machine, 1TB seemed to be the minimum storage I felt comfortable configuring.
This has real costs – we’re now paying more for storage on our phones, our laptops and on cloud storage. This growth in storage requirements isn’t sustainable. Will we end up with 10TB Macbooks and 5TB iPhones in a few years? Will we pay month on month for 10TB of iCloud storage?
Perhaps what we will end up with is a tiered structure for storage, with different costs based on how frequently and quickly we need data. Something on the lines of Amazon Web Services’ storage options for app developers:
Distributed storage, perhaps with cryptocurrency payment and incentives like Filecoin or Arweave, are a wild card here, especially for long-term, slow-access storage.
I think these will soon become questions that most of us will have to deal with once we each reach a certain tipping point for personal storage, and that it’ll become a public conversation spanning cloud storage and application bloat. My guess is it’ll happen at about 5TB. How long will that take?