He bought an iphone 6s as a testing device that would spend most of its life in a desk drawer! I hope this was a company expense or something? One of those would be like a weeks wages for me. I can't understand why people pay so much for smart phones anyway. And if your idiotic phone runs out of memory at the top of some mountain, "the moment isn't missed forever", the moment gets missed because you're mucking about with a stupid phone instead of enjoying the moment with your family.
I ran into this recently. The 16 GB is an outright lie.<p>First, a bunch is reserved for the OS and similar. The phone might only start out with 12 GB for the user.<p>Second, a bunch just "disappears". Attach a phone to iTunes and it claims perhaps 2 GB free. But view the free space within the phone itself and it might only show 500 MB free. Huge discrepancies are inevitable, and it doesn't seem possible to find out how to resolve them.<p>Third, a large chunk is often taken by Apple with pending iOS updates pushed to the phone. But then the phone refuses to actually do the update, claiming there's not enough free storage.<p>It's a clusterfuck. And there's very little discussion or outrage about it. Apple should be embarrassed, but they don't give a shit.
First there is Photo Stream which stores backups of your photos <i>on the same phone</i> -- even those you delete. Not even sure how it got turned on. Don't even have another iOS device.<p>Then being "savvy", I was copying and deleting photos directly through explorer. Well, this leads to ghost space, which is resolved by setting the clock back to reveal deleted but unpurged photos in the recycle bin [0]. Wack.<p>Then found Dropbox Carousel. Victory of the cloud, no more local storage needs. Except still kept running out of space. Turns out Carousel uses as much as it can as cache (in my case 4GB). WTF!<p>So yes, I'd wholeheartedly agree that 16GB is a bad user experience. Users are basically in constant competition with Apple and other apps for space, and at 16GB the user is constantly losing.<p>--<p>[0] <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6560594?start=45&tstart=0" rel="nofollow">https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6560594?start=45&tstart...</a>
This would all be trivially solved if Apple would just put a goddamn SD card slot in it.<p>Storage size as sole model differentiation is sooo 2001. At this point it genuinely makes Apple look out of touch in a market where every other flagship quality model doesn't bother with it and includes an SD slot, partly I suspect because it's just saner from a production and inventory standpoint even besides the consumer benefits.
Of course 16Gb is an "uncomfortable" user experience. It's supposed to be.<p>It's about market segmentation.<p>It's not cost. 32gb memory units in bulk are like $1 maybe. Apple charges an extra $100 because they are using that easy-to-understand difference to segment the market and collect an extra $100 profit from those that can afford that price point.
I have no problems with 16GB iPhone which I've had since the 3G.
Currently I have 72 apps installed. Syncing with 8 email addresses.<p>I use Spotify for music, and have an offline playlist with about 2GB songs. Photos and movies are synced to the cloud, and files older than 1 month are deleted from the device. I have 3.2GB available.<p>So while your points may be valid for some, I can manage fine with 16GB. And it's not like I'm thinking about it, and change my habits to have the 16GB phone.
Yeah, it's no good. I have a 16 GB model. I've bought into the iCloud-powered photos syncing, but yet somehow there is never space on my phone. The whole point was to automatically move photos to the cloud, yet 9/10 times I open my camera, it says "Not enough space to take a photo".
As someone who has a 16gb nexus 5 and is writing this post from a 16gb chromebook that also has a linux installation. Give me a break. 16gb is storage, has nothing to do with a user experience. Your iphone is not a camcorder. If recording video is of utmost importance to you, then buy a phone with massive storage or one that can accept an SD card.
Just write a script that would move all the videos and photos off the device when docked each night or each week. 1G a day for photo's and 3 video's should be enough for everybody, you don't have the time to rewatch them anyway. Less is more.
Or just get an Android device with a microsd port; 128G is cheap.
Well, surprise. You're part of what those on the right side of the game call "planned obsolescence". Unfortunately, you're on the wrong side of the game. Now please stop asking questions and continue consuming.
Very interesting as it entirely contradicts apples recent statements in interviews that 16gb is fine as a base model (Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and Jonny Ive stated this if I remember correctly). This is clearly not true if it means that 17% of their ENTIRE iPhone 6 users is low on memory, or 37% of their 16gb iPhone 6 users.<p>It's factual evidence that Apple does indeed play games and tries to maximise profits and obsolescence of its devices, despite always claiming the opposite. All because they're unwilling to add a couple of dollars to their bill of materials.<p>They should be ashamed.
Apple doesn't keep the base model small to save costs. They do it to increase revenue (and margins).<p>The cost to go from 16GB to 32GB is inconsequential. (They upped the step-up from 32GB to 64GB with no increase in price.) In fact, the cost to them from 16GB to 64GB is probably inconsequential. It's certainly nothing near the $100 in price.<p>The reason they keep it at 16GB is to make more people upgrade to 64GB. If the base model was 32GB, far fewer people would upgrade to 64GB, precisely <i>because</i> you would no longer have an unacceptably bad user experience.
I've been bitten by this too. It's not that I need a lot of space for apps, but taking pictures or video can fill up the space quite quickly as is; I can't imagine what it would be like with 4K.<p>My iPod had 80GB of space. My nikon has a 128GB card in it. These are roles the iPhone is supposed to play, but it's an imitation at best because the storage is so hindered.<p>That and battery life are the two biggest pains I have with my iPhone, but apple seems to think everything is great as-is in those departments.
An interesting article which raises a good point: the problem with Apple products isn't the price, there is a place for good high priced products, but that some of them are really bad products because of memory limitations. At 16gb you can not use all of its advertised features, unless you rely on streaming/cloud storage only.<p>And it is not only the iPhone hit by this. I have a 64g iPad, the biggest configuration they offered at that time. For years now, its usage has been limited by the storage filling up. For this reason alone, I will not be buying this release of the iPad pro. A machine which is supposed to partially replace a laptop needs 256g at minimum, possibly 512g. Even if such configurations were more expensive than the currently offered ones, they would still be more interesting as those which just have no way of getting the desired storage sizes.
It's fine for my atypical usage ... but then I am on Linux and have never liked itunes so have no music on there, and don't take many pics as am with someone that doesn't like photos taken.
I can add to the anecdata that 16GB has not been an issue for me.<p>Isn't there another obvious spin on the data? It seems obvious that at least 70% of users with 16GB phones are doing fine with that amount of storage. Wouldn't it be a poor decision—certainly from a business point of view—to mandate larger storage for them, when they clearly aren't even using 16GB?
One can't both consider that one's primary use of the iphone is to record pictures and videos and at the same time go for the model with the smallest possible disk size and then complain about the lack of space.<p>The premium Apple charges for larger disk space is ridiculously uncorrelated with the cost of the components but the solution to this is better competition.
Apple buys their Flash chips, right? With all the advancements in Flash technology lately, I'm surprised their suppliers aren't offering to just swap out higher-capacity chips on their orders for the same price in order to keep a giant customer like Apple on a current, rather than legacy, chip fab.
I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned that folks will take more Live Photos than extended videos with these phones. How much storage do you need before the next auto wifi sync? Let it auto-delete old sync'd stuff. The problem is s/w not h/w.
The iPhone is supposed to be a high end device with great user satisfaction, Apple you are ruining it with this policy. User will have a bad taste and never buy an iPhone again, you are playing a dangerous game here.
Bad user experience depends on the user. Personally I very much enjoy the somewhat lower price of less-beefy models of smartphones and tablets — as I'm not obsessed with taking pictures, don't play blockbuster video games on mobile, and prefer my books as text, instead of audio files.<p>The title of the post is similar to saying e.g. "ARM CPU is bad UX", and complain that you can't mine Bitcoin effectively on ARM.