Purgeable disc space
Why is there not a simple means to clean out the purged portion of the hard drive. Its my computer why does apple think it has the right to deide when this space is cleaned up?
Purgeable storage is not under the user's control. It is completely controlled by the system. Just ignore the Purgeable storage because you cannot do anything about it. macOS may release some of it at some unknown point in the future (or maybe not).
The only thing the user can do is control the amount of actual Free storage space is present on the system. Ideally the user should always have at least 20% Free (even better is having at least 100GB of Free space especially for smaller boot SSDs & lower end systems). Even that 100GB can quickly disappear even with seemingly simple workloads. For some workloads the user will need a lot more Free space (like when performing HD video editing, etc.).
Ignore the very misleading "Available" storage value shown every where in macOS since it is not synonymous with Free. The only place where the Free storage is correctly shown is in Disk Utility. Even the "Used" storage value can be misleading depending on the user's system.
People who tend to be watching the storage space tend to have incorrectly sized systems for their particular workloads. This seems to be quite common on this forum. People can try relocating the largest files/folders to external media. Apple does provide instructions for relocating iTunes/Music libraries, Photos/iPhoto libraries, video libraries, etc. to external media to make more room on the internal boot SSD.
You can always provide Apple with product feedback here:
