A few weeks ago, I set up a new Mac Mini M2 Pro.
I set up the system from scratch to clean up and install only the apps I use.
However, just a few weeks later, I find myself with a lot of installed apps once again.
In the menu bar, for example, I have
CleanShot,
Little Snitch,
Hook,
Ad Guard,
Keyboard Maestro,
Hazel,
Raycast,
and Popclip.
Do you have many apps on your Mac?
How many apps are in your menu bar?
I don’t want to count them, Launchpad has 5 pages. A lot of them I never touch though and should remove. I have my core maybe 6-7 apps I use daily that are pretty much always open.
I manage my menu bar icons. With Bartender on my MBP, but I just remove the ones I will never use on my Studio. So I only have 8 right now.
I’ve got at least 217 apps on my Mac:
Thanks to Bartender, my menu bar normally is pretty clean, showing only iStat Menus, ScanSnap, keyboard, bartender, control panel, and time:
But 14 icons are hidden.
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I do have around 130 --after a Sunday cleaning 
I also happen to use Bartender to keep the menubar tidy.
As few as possible I find myself regularly going through and deleting apps I feel like I don’t need or use any longer. Currently I have 30 apps that are not Apples preinstalled apps. Many I have on a folder called “Background Apps” because that’s what they are, ie Magnet, Tot, Hazel…
I don’t know I didn’t think just to look how many apps were in the folder. 106 for me then.
458
“Hi I am Richard and I am an app addict.”
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43 that didn’t come pre-installed. Of those, there are 21 that I use at least on a weekly basis. Now that has me thinking I need to take a hard look at those other 22.
289 items in my applications folder.
26 items in the utilities folder.
40 formulae, 6 casks, 9 taps via Homebrew.
I use Bartender to manage the menu bar items.
I have a number of applications that I may use once or twice a year. But they are there when I need them. And disk space is cheap.
And I’ll often trial several items in the same genre, before deciding which, if any, to keep.
My Mac’s main job is to store files and do backups.
1Password
Arq
BBEdit
Chrome
Downie
Drafts
EagleFiler
Google Drive
Houdaspot
Permute
Transmit
I also have a Mac mini I use as a server only. It has just the following apps installed beyond those that came with it:
Backblaze
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
Disk Inventory X
DriveDx
Hazel
Plex Media Server
Resilio Sync
SuperDuper!
UniFi
iStat Menus
10 total, plus 6 menu bar app icons (I don’t run Bartender on this machine):
Hazel
Plex
iStat Menus
Backblaze
Resilio Sync
Chrono Agent
About 15 apps that aren’t preinstalled.
Four of those are Safari extensions (1blocker, vinegar, baking soda, stopthemadness pro)
Four are games.
One is the configuration app for my mic.
The only app I have that I allow to add a menu bar icon is 1Password.
None of them are Keyboard Maestro, Alfred, or similar 
About 75 in addition to what came with my MBP.
Here are my numbers:
- 183 items in /Applications
- 27 apps + 1 folder in the Dock
- 15 third-party items in the menu bar (mostly behind Bartender)
I don’t use bartender or anything like that.
74 on the menu bar, some are in the process of being eliminated. 157 in my app folder but that includes things that are not really apps per se, like 6 different versions of Python, and some where there are multiple folders for 1 app or helpers for an app like Scan Snap that has 3 separate folders for stuff related to it and Adobe, which has a lot of extra folders even though I only use 2 apps.
UPDATE:
Edited to remove the reference to the launchbar. I do use the apps at the bottom which is the launchbar, I was thinking of an appI remember being called launchbar. So my 74 items are on the bottom of the screen whatever it’s being called now 
- 121 items in Applications
- 24 apps + 1 folder in Dock
- 25 items in menu bar (including the apple defaults)
- used to use BarTender, but I always forget what was put away or what was being used
how much storage do you have on your computer?
You have double the apps I have, but also 3x the storage available.
I have a 1TB, with about 115gb of free space left.
Teach us your storage secrets!
- 114 items in /Applications
- 12 apps + 1 folder in the Dock
- 11 third-party items in the menu bar
tl;dr the secret is having a separate server computer.
Most apps don’t take that much space. 88 GB total. Games take about 22GB of that, and that’s probably the most wasteful 
. Most media is stored on my Mac mini server which has 17TB of storage available of which I’m using about half. I’ve got maybe half a dozen virtual machine images on the iMac, and that uses 115GB. 80GB of photos which are replicated on the server so I really don’t need them locally as well.
I suppose the bottom line is that with the server I could squeak by with 500GB with 1TB being comfortable. But if I didn’t have the server I wouldn’t be able to have a large enough internal drive on my iMac, so would require a large external drive (like the one on my mini!).
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I am not throughly using my Synology properly then haha…but the benefit of the mac mini server over the synology in this specific case, is that your iCloud Photo Library is downloaded there. I have photos on my Synology, but every so often the weekly or monthly task of copying photos to the synology…