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Is Lion a fatter Cat than snow leopard?

tlinford

tlinford

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 4, 2009
185
0
Edinburgh
Does anyone know how much HD space the Lion OS takes.

I remember one of the selling points for Snow Leopard was that it had a smaller footprint that Leopard, which was remarkable. In fact Snow Leopard only occupies about 7gbytes of hard drive, a very trim cat indeed!

Does Lion come with a larger footprint? does anyone know how much HD is taken up by it?
 
Lion is a "real" upgrade. It has more features where Snow Leopard was basically a service pack, which fixed all of Leopard's underlying faults.
 
I'm not sure that answers the question? I was curious about this as well and also if the overall OS was faster.
 
aeaglex07 said:
Lion is a "real" upgrade. It has more features where Snow Leopard was basically a service pack, which fixed all of Leopard's underlying faults.
Click to expand...

Sorry but Snow Leopard was a major restructure under the surface. True 64 bit processing. It kept more to less the same interface and the footprint halved.

This doesn't answer the question with facts...

Does anyone with a developer built know the data?
 
If you perform a standard installation without printer drivers and language packs, Lion takes about 8GB of space as compared to Snow Leopard’s 7GB. So yes, it does take up a bit more room.

This number is an approximation and subject to change. An official minimum disk space requirement will be suggested by Apple only after the official date of release.

Does it really matter, though? 1GB isn’t really that much space given the capacity of modern disk drives. Also, this doesn’t mean that the operating system is any less lean or robust compared to Snow Leopard, but rather it simply indicates a bigger general footprint for disk consumption. The actual binaries are still highly optimized for performance from all the maintenance that was done with the release of 10.6.
 
Getting there..

Takuro said:
If you perform a standard installation without printer drivers and language packs, Lion takes about 8GB of space as compared to Snow Leopard’s 7GB. So yes, it does take up a bit more room.

This number is an approximation and subject to change. An official minimum disk space requirement will be suggested by Apple only after the official date of release.

Does it really matter, though? 1GB isn’t really that much space given the capacity of modern disk drives. Also, this doesn’t mean that the operating system is any less lean or robust compared to Snow Leopard, but rather it simply indicates a bigger general footprint for disk consumption. The actual binaries are still highly optimized for performance from all the maintenance that was done with the release of 10.6.
Click to expand...

Thank you for an intelligent answer, this is helpful.
 
tlinford said:
I run a VMwared XP virtualisation for a couple of legacy things. The file is 20gig, was a waste!!!!!
Click to expand...

20 gigs? For XP?


:rolleyes:

Oh, MS...

Don't get me wrong, I still use Windows and there are the odd times when it behaves itself... but OS X just behaves by default!
 
RafaelT said:
That's what happens when you have crap code in there that dates back to the late 70's.
Click to expand...

It's crazy how we can't really estimate the size of Windows... it just grows randomly over time for some reason.
 
Windows 7 (and probably Vista) sets aside disk space equivalent to the size of your RAM to save data during hibernate. I discovered this after installing 12GB of RAM. Fortunately, you can turn off hibernate and get this precious space back. Win 7 x64 definitely takes up more space than 32 bit.
 
RafaelT said:
That's what happens when you have crap code in there that dates back to the late 70's.
Click to expand...

Well, OS X is based on UNIX BSD, which was based on the original UNIX platform. I guarantee at least some of the lower-level code hasn't been changed in the last 40 years. Recently, a 25-year-old bug in BSD was just patched. If you need any hard evidence that modern machines do run old code at their core, well, there you go.

The problem is when you're using 40-year old device drivers, like Windows attempted to do for ancient legacy hardware. That's just b/s.
 
Takuro said:
Well, OS X is based on UNIX BSD, which was based on the original UNIX platform. I guarantee at least some of the lower-level code hasn't been changed in the last 40 years. Recently, a 25-year-old bug in BSD was just patched. If you need any hard evidence that modern machines do run old code at their core, well, there you go.

The problem is when you're using 40-year old device drivers, like Windows attempted to do for ancient legacy hardware. That's just b/s.
Click to expand...

Right, that is why I specifically said crap code. Nothing wrong with really old good code.
 
The size of windows is due to the fact that it has to be compatible with a relatively large number of hardware out there. Imagine how many types of graphic cards/sound cards/printers and other stuff supported by Windows, it's a lot!
While at the same time, Mac OS X only supports a very limited number of configurations, in fact, Apple always drop support for older Macs with every new OS X release. Snow Leopard drops support for PowerPC Macs, and Lion will most likely not install on CoreDuo Macs.
 
duyvan82 said:
The size of windows is due to the fact that it has to be compatible with a relatively large number of hardware out there. Imagine how many types of graphic cards/sound cards/printers and other stuff supported by Windows, it's a lot!
While at the same time, Mac OS X only supports a very limited number of configurations, in fact, Apple always drop support for older Macs with every new OS X release. Snow Leopard drops support for PowerPC Macs, and Lion will most likely not install on CoreDuo Macs.
Click to expand...

That's a good point.
 
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