The base M2 Macbook air comes with a single 256 GB SSD Hard drive of storage space, but do you really get the full 256 GB? How much of it is actually usable?
Is the actual storage space on an M2 air less than 256 GB?
Everyone says the base M2 air comes with 256 GBs of storage. After booting your system, find the hard disk on your computer and view its properties or get info.
As shown in the screenshot below, the “flash storage” or hard disk says 251 GB. That’s like 5 Gigs less than 256.
To the right we see the memory usage bar indicating the total memory is 245.11 GB. Note that we have not yet used the new computer for anything and seem to have consumed 10.89 GBs of hard drive space right out of the box.
How much memory does the macOS consume of the storage space
Hovering over that memory bar we can see that macOS alone consumes 15.43 GB. Which means that out of the 245.11 GB hard disk, we are left with 229.7 GBs to work with.
But then, it also says 214.52 GB available. Have some apps also consumed some space?
To summarize, the 256 GB of storage of an unboxed new M2 MacBook Air base model translates to around 215GBs of usable space for your files.
Connecting an external hard drive with a USB-C hub dongle is a way to get more storage space.
By the way, This is not why I returned my M2 MacBook Air.
