Your Mac’s hard drive is full … again. What’s taking up all that space? Endless applications promise to answer this question and help you free up space, most with a subscription. I’ve tested many over the years, and few are easier to recommend than Purge.
This totally free, open source app gives you a quick breakdown of what’s taking up space on your hard drive and offers a few specific ways to free it up. Even better: There are no ads or upsells. Purge can even delete Apple Intelligence’s offline models from macOS 27, which could free up over 10 GB.
But even if you want to keep Apple’s AI features, you can still clear up plenty of space. Your Mac, like any computer, tends to build up clutter over time. Sure, you might have forgotten about the games, images, and videos you downloaded, but caches also take up space. These are files downloaded and saved to speed things up, which can be useful. The problem is they can stick around longer than necessary and take up space. And then there are caches and settings left behind by apps you uninstalled ages ago—they’re still there, eating up precious bytes.
Purge is designed to help you clean all that out, but it can do more. It’s built around lists of files known to be safe to purge. There’s also a list of things it will never touch, including crucial system files and your own documents. Finally, Purge sends files to the Trash instead of deleting them outright, so you can always recover them if something breaks.
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Courtesy of Justin Pot
To get started, download Purge and install it. Open the application, and it will show you what’s taking up space on your Mac.
If you want, click the Clean Safe Items button, and the app will handle it, assuming you trust it. I recommend paying a bit more attention, though. First, delete some caches. You’ll see a list of caches, all of which are safe to purge periodically.
You’ll also see Apple’s Aerial screen savers here. These videos are very cool, but take up a lot of space—delete them if you, like most 21st-century people, don’t use a screen saver.
There’s also a Dev Tools section, which isn’t relevant for most people. If you use Homebrew, though, don’t skip this—it’s an easy way to delete cached installation files you don’t need anymore.
The next tool shows you only the largest files on your computer, likely videos or other large media. I ended up moving a few things I’d forgotten about off my laptop—I bet you’ll find something, too.
Up next is a tool for uninstalling apps. Note that this doesn’t just remove the application—it also removes every file associated with it, including your settings, caches, and anything the application downloaded. Deleting applications in Finder doesn’t do this, meaning you might leave all kinds of files behind.
Speaking of that, there’s also a tool that shows leftover data from applications you’ve already deleted. In my case, it was several gigabytes, all basically wasted. I highly recommend checking this section and deleting anything large that you’re confident you won’t use again.
Finally, so long as we’re talking about things you’re not using, there’s Apple Intelligence. Apple’s most recent operating systems come preloaded with offline AI models, which power things like notification summaries, writing suggestions, and the new AI-powered Siri. You might like and use these features, but if not, Apple removed the toggle in macOS 27 that lets you disable them altogether.
That’s why Purge has one final tool that can completely remove the Apple Intelligence models. Click it, and you’ll see a list of installed models above a delete button. Click the button, and Purge will delete the models and prevent macOS from reinstalling them.
These features are why I plan on keeping Purge around. It’s a great way to see what’s taking up space on your drive and then do something about it.
