The Plus tier is 209 GB. Strategies for finding the room without losing your real data. The whole sequence below stays on the Mac.
Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 12 or later, the unified-memory minimum that the chosen tier requires (6 GB for Nano, 12 GB for Lite, 16 GB for Quick, 24 GB for Core and Vision 3.8, 64 GB for Plus). Internet is required only for the one-time model download.
~/.cache/huggingface/ often holds duplicate snapshots.~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData can be tens of GB.The Plus tier alone is 209 GB on disk. A typical Mac with 512 GB total storage will feel pressure once the OS, Xcode, Photos, and Plus weights are all present.
Reclaim in that order, because it runs cheapest-first. The Hugging Face cache is the usual surprise: it keeps a full snapshot per revision, so trying two versions of one tier leaves two complete copies on disk with nothing warning you. Xcode derived data is the next-largest easy win and is safe to delete outright, since it rebuilds on demand. Deleting a tier from Settings > Models is instant and reversible — the only cost of getting it wrong is downloading it again, which is why it belongs last rather than first.
Cloud models do not consume your disk. They consume your wallet per token instead. The trade-off is direct.
The Plus tier alone is 209 GB on disk. A typical Mac with 512 GB total storage will feel pressure once the OS, Xcode, Photos, and Plus weights are all present.
Reclaim in that order, because it runs cheapest-first. The Hugging Face cache is the usual surprise: it keeps a full snapshot per revision, so trying two versions of one tier leaves two complete copies on disk with nothing warning you. Xcode derived data is the next-largest easy win and is safe to delete outright, since it rebuilds on demand. Deleting a tier from Settings > Models is instant and reversible — the only cost of getting it wrong is downloading it again, which is why it belongs last rather than first.
The Plus tier alone is 209 GB on disk. A typical Mac with 512 GB total storage will feel pressure once the OS, Xcode, Photos, and Plus weights are all present.
Reclaim in that order, because it runs cheapest-first. The Hugging Face cache is the usual surprise: it keeps a full snapshot per revision, so trying two versions of one tier leaves two complete copies on disk with nothing warning you. Xcode derived data is the next-largest easy win and is safe to delete outright, since it rebuilds on demand. Deleting a tier from Settings > Models is instant and reversible — the only cost of getting it wrong is downloading it again, which is why it belongs last rather than first.
This guide does not claim feature parity with cloud-side workflows for “how to free up disk space for large local models”. Specifically, the product surface in v1.11.469 covers chat, file attachment, the local agent loop, project scoping, and the model picker. Cross-device sync, team workspaces, and shared session history are out of scope and are not on the v1.9 backlog either.
Nano 2.37 GB, Lite 5.04 GB, Quick 15.61 GB, Core 15.13 GB, Code 15.13 GB (shares Core weights), Vision 3.8 15.5 GB, Plus 209 GB. Plus alone is more than half a typical 512 GB SSD’s usable capacity once the OS is accounted for; the v1.9 streaming engine improvements only reduce the working RAM requirement, not the disk requirement.
A clean Outlier install with Nano + Lite costs about 8 GB. Adding Core lifts that to 23 GB, Vision 3.8 adds 15.5 GB, Quick adds 16 GB, Plus alone adds 209 GB. Quick numbers in the model picker.
4 steps, zero network requests after the model is downloaded. Hugging Face cache duplicates can hide tens of GB; du -sh ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/ usually reveals the surprise.
Requires Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, or M4) — Intel Macs are not supported. macOS 12+.
Open weights ship constantly and most are not worth your disk. When one beats a tier Outlier already has, on hardware you already own, we say so and what it replaces. That is the only reason we email.
Your address and which site you sent it from. No IP, no user agent, no referer. Nothing is sent until you press the button. Privacy.
Outlier runs entirely on your Mac. No prompts leave the device. macOS 12+ on Apple Silicon (arm64). Apache 2.0 model weights. Back to home.