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I have an old MacBook Air currently running Mojave. I am trying to clear out enough empty space to upgrade the OS. When I look in About this Mac | Storage, it shows 25.02 GB of available space. But when I try to upgrade the OS, it shows there are only 20.11 GB available. Why would these two numbers be different, and how can I clear out more space?
MacBook Air (2018 – 2020)
Completely ignore the "Available" value since it is very misleading. Most times you have less even less space than is shown with "Available". Only use the Free space value which can be retrieved from Disk Utility.
FYI, you always need to have at least 20GB+ of Free storage space at all times for the normal operation of macOS. For some workloads you may need a lot more Free space. Even 20GB will disappear very quickly with many workloads. If you completely run out of Free space, then bad things will happen such as no longer being able to delete any files to make more room due to how the APFS file system works.
20GB of Available space.....even if it equals 20GB of Free space is not enough to install macOS.
I hope you have frequent & regular backups.
Long story short, only Disk Utility accurately shows available space accurately.
About this Mac | Storage shows different amount of available space than Monterey installer
