A coworker has an issue with her MacBook Air: it’s running out of hard drive space. Her laptop only has 128 gigabytes of storage. In between all her dalliances with the Adobe suite and (presumably) syncing photos from her iPhone, the hard drive is rapidly up against the free space ceiling. I’m not sure why anyone would buy a laptop with so little storage (even for 2019 when said coworker made the purchase), but nevertheless.
Another coworker suggests that she buy an external hard drive. Yet another said she should delete some Adobe working files that seems to be taking an inordinate amount of space. I offered seemingly (to me) the most effective solution: sell the MacBook Air, and buy a new laptop with as much internal storage as she can afford. The other solutions appear to only fix the problem temporarily. Eventually she’ll run out of space once again, and either will have to offload more file to the external drive ,or another round of file deletion.
Of course, no one likes to hear that they should buy a new laptop when the one they’ve got is still relatively new. I’m just of the opinion that if you’re able to throw money to solve a nagging problem, you should absolutely do it. I paid substantially extra to have two terabytes of storage on my MacBook Pro precisely because I don’t want to ever deal with running out of space and juggling external drives. One of the main point to a laptop is its portability, is it not? Dragging along additional devices seem counterproductive.
I think the coworker is going with buying an external hard drive, which is far less costly than my proposal. A patch on a pothole rather than repaving the road entirely. It’s okay: I appreciate that people may view money differently than I do (this coworker gets paid the same as I do, so it’s not like her disposable income is less than mine). I’m lucky enough to be able to view money as a tool, and I try to have as little emotional attachment to it as possible.
One laptop to rule them all.