okay... so i dug up an old disc earlier, Photoshop 7, and then CS1. fully installed, both applications came to ~100mb each (including their respective Imageready bundles).

and then there's CS5.... which takes up 1.7GB

i also found my discs for 3dsmax5, 6, 7... which came to between 600 and 700mb each.
2011 comes to 1.2GB.

now... with 3dsmax i can see "some" noticeable feature additions, which could explain some of the bloat. but photosho... 1.6GB increase in disc space, and i really don't understand why, or what's going on.
can anyone enlighten me as to wtf is going into the latest versions of these software packages that is causing them to bloat so much?

It's probably the feature additions you don't see, or don't often use. I just checked and my programs have the same sizes. I really haven't had a problem with them though.

I don't really remember but wasn't photoshop pc only or mac only before ? Now you have both version on the same disk, I wonder if the merge has not made adobe engineer share ressources without the specific optimisation of each version.

[EDIT] Also 64 bits. And if you didn't make a custom install you've got:



BTW I didn't check on my hard disk but if you did a minimal install you may have some junk file in your folder.

If you accepted all the tutorial files, that'll get beefy. On top of that, some might be 16 bit or HDR, which can be exponentially larger.

Aside from what was already mentioned, I've heard that as computers have gotten beefer (like, over the last 10-20 years, not just this year), a lot of coding has gone on to be less and less efficient; if you have a machine with 64K of RAM, you need your code to be like a dolphin's blowhole. If you've got 16GB of RAM, who cares? Code gets sloppier, longer, and the lack of savings gets passed on to the users. Meanwhile, HD space is incredibly cheap (unless you're on a laptop), and there's no reason to care there, either. It's lame, but it's accepted.

ya my maya 2012 install is taking 1.7gb, but my PS is olny taking 700mb, and most of my other apps i use are really small, just things like silo, xnromal.

and my zbrush 4 install is olny at 450mb so it is also pretty small.

with PS dont know if it makes a difference but my is standalone, don't got master collection or design premium or anything like that just PS.

I have cs5 64 and it takes 430 MB

Its max and maya that take up alot of space for me.

Max and Maya both are 600-700MB installation files for the 64bit if you find the correct folder to look at.

The reason the installations are so big, if you're using the launcher, is because they install at the same time all the needed drivers, such as DX, VCRedist, COM DLL's, and others. Plus, extra materials, so this all adds.

With more access to PC's, you also need to remember that most people wouldn't know what a DirectX is, nor how to update...darn hippies.

Maybe it's some sort of anti-piracy measure, a 100mb program gets downloaded way easier than a 2gb one,

Pfft, I wish. I don't see how Substance, OkinaTransPoly, Bioderm and a few plugins which I will need to buy after 30 days coming bundled in my 3ds max installation will stop piracy, and a clever pirate will just give the option to the user to choose what to download.

If they really wanted to stop piracy, they should create a license system based upon MotionBuilder, last I heard, getting that thing to run is a bitch (even legally).