Your venting rings pretty hollow to me since you haven’t even tried a mac, but prodded me into some experiments. Using mac terminal to get into the directory of various mp3 players, it looked like “sudo du -h -d 1” shows the sizes of every thing underneath, hidden or otherwise.
There would be a few dozen K for trash and sevensomething(?) hidden directories. Assuming you have emptied the trash - I wish trash was automatically emptied at disconnect or logoff (and their hidden directories eliminated), but it has saved me a few times.
There would be a meg or two for hidden spotlight directories. I used to hate these spotlight “leavings”, but for one thing I guess you can turn it off at spotlight preferences. For another thing, I think it is responsible for the unbelievable search speed now available. Used to take several minutes to do a whole disk search, but now it is instantaneous.
On an apple ipod only, there would be some itunes hidden directory of some size that I forget but possibly more than a meg. I hate itunes, but I guess it is a neccesary evil that is keeping artists paid due to having more revenue than shrinking CD oriented companies.
So bottom line is mac’s do generate a bit of junk, but normally of insignificant size. It seems to me this is in exchange for vastly superior human factors than Windows, which is one of the worst computer interfaces ever stolen/invented and illegally marketed. I don’t say this from knee-jerk allegiances, because learned windows before apple, and 2 other systems before windows. I have worked on intel-clone chips and apple proprietary chips. Apple has a few annoyances, but Windows is the epicenter of ■■■■. It’s ruthless practices killed a lot of software systems superior to both windows and apple.
