27 ms·
$399 USD is great, but why are we still stuck with 16 GB of storage on base model phones? You can barely put a day's worth of music on your phone and you cannot
by afreak 11y ago
$399 USD is great, but why are we still stuck with 16 GB of storage on base model phones? You can barely put a day's worth of music on your phone and you cannot always stream via services like Spotify.
Spotify accounts for 2 GB of traffic per month on my phone and some plans are barely affordable when you want more than that--fortunately I can do up to 6 GB before I am traffic shaped, but that isn't the say the same for all carriers in this country.
- agildehaus 11y agoIt encourages people to spend an extra $100. If the base model were 32GB, far fewer would.
- phesse14 11y agoand do not forget the cloud storage. Moore's law is in decadence
- duaneb 11y agoNot bandwidth, though.
- grandalf 11y agoIf the 16GB phone would just treat the local storage like a cache for everything it would be plenty of storage. With rare exceptions the expiry rules for my usage would be quite simple. That app I use once every two months can be re-downloaded when I want to use it (it's probably less than 20 MB in size anyway).
- Blaaguuu 11y agoThat seems great in theory, but many people still have really restrictive data caps on their plans, so I'm not sure we are quite ready for that model. It would also suck if you had an app on your phone like a star/constellation map, which you only use every once in a while when you are out in the middle of nowhere... To have your phone automatically delete that app, then try to re-download it when there isn't any way to do so would be a pretty awful experience. Works well for something like the Apple TV - I don't think it's good for phones yet.
- grandalf 11y agoWell I'd want to be able to flag certain apps to not be expired, or to be restored next time I connect to WiFi if they were cleared for some reason. Apps that take more than a second or two to download over LTE would be the difficult edge cases, but there are very few such apps, and even if they occupied 50% of the phone's storage and were never reaped the caching approach would be fine. The big issue is the data cap, but things are trending toward unlimited data (I have it with T-Mobile now) and many of us are often connected to WiFi at least periodically throughout the day.
- maccard 11y agoMost of the apps that are installed on my iOS device are ~100MB - slack (140) Snapchat (140) Spotify (100) viber(100) messenger (97) Airbnb (97) Etsy/Yelp/Starbucks/ are all roughly 70MB - Facebook is ~150 I believe. The worst part is that all of those apps are pretty much webviews...
- bdrool 11y agoFacebook's app has a super-bloated > 100MB binary: http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-the-facebook-ios-application-is-so http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th... I think they have something like 150+ iOS devs, so they're almost up to a megabyte per dev!
- maccard 11y agoMessenger is another facebook app, which is almost 100MB on top of having facebook installed.
- toxican 11y agoThis is partly why I just stick to the mobile version of the site. It's a slightly buggy sometimes (repetitious frontpage), but it works well enough and it isn't draining my battery in the background for no reason.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoSadly cache invalidation is one of the two hard problems in computer science. It sounds easy and simple but... it's not.
- grandalf 11y agoI realize that, but what aspects of it do you think are particularly hard in the example I used? Right now many people with 16GB phones have to go through a fairly painful manual process to avoid getting error messages/warnings about storage. So while it is difficult, I think that from a product perspective there would be only upside to treating it as a cache compared with the horrible usability of a 16GB IOS device with a typical 2016 usage pattern.
- plurinshael 11y agoOut of curiosity... what is the other hard problem?
- philwelch 11y agoNaming things. Also off-by-one errors.
- MichaelGG 11y agoNaming things and off-by-one errors.
- betenoire 11y ago"There are two hard things in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors." cache invalidation: distributed resource synchronization naming things: all things abstraction off by one: we always fuck it up somehow
- tdkl 11y agoNextbit Robin Android phone does exactly that : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31SHvxSxrj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31SHvxSxrj4
- some-guy 11y agoGoing for 16GB storage on my 5S might be what makes me upgrade...otherwise the phone still seems fast / good enough for most tasks after 2.5 years of ownership.
- raverbashing 11y agoIt's Apple being petty (price segmentation), basically. How much does 16Gb cost today, $10?
- jsprogrammer 11y agoWal*Mart sells 16GB flash products for $4.99. Company margins need to be padded somewhere?
- ropiku 11y agoStill it's not at the iPhone speed, 6S uses fast NVME flash. Definitely not 100$ but not comparable with an microSD card either.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoYou get what you pay for. A while ago I bought a Sandisk 64 GB USB flash at Costco on clearance for what I thought was a good price. I wanted to use it to back up a laptop on which I don't have too many files, so 64 GB was just right. Big mistake! Huge! I formatted the flash and started backup and it was pathetic. A MB per second write speed. If that. I gave up after a few hours. I went back to my tiny Apricorn backup drive, which I love, and which uses a 1.8" hard drive internally. Zoom. Easily 10x faster than that Sandisk flash. As I said, you get what you pay for.
- cellularmitosis 11y ago
- forgotmypassw 11y agoThe same reason why you pay $600 for 32 GB of RAM with Apple.
- FireBeyond 11y agoTechnically, for 24 GB of RAM... since they keep the base 8GB that it came with, for your $600.
- oconnore 11y agoA full 24 hours worth of music (~33 complete albums) at 192 kbps is only 2GB.
- devindotcom 11y agoAnd that's about all the space you'll have with ios and default apps!
- danieldk 11y agoI have an iPhone 5s 16 GB with a bunch of apps and games installed, plus some albums at 256/320 kbit/s and it currently has 6.5GB free.
- Cyph0n 11y agoAdd some photos and audio books, and it's basically full. 16 GB is too little for most use cases.
- lcfcjs 11y agoI disagree, i think you have way too many apps, videos, music, podcasts, documents, get yourself sorted
- danieldk 11y agoDepends on your use case. I use Dropbox for storing photos, since my network connection is generally good enough for it to be fast and seamless (I guess they send resized photos). I do keep music on my phone, but I don't need my > 500 album collection, just some new stuff that I change every couple of weeks. Among computer illiterates in my family it also doesn't seem to be a problem. My mother has been using 16GB iPads and iPod Touches for years and never ran out of storage. Sure, if you play lot's of > 1GB games (which seems to be typical these days), you don't want a 16GB model.
- Bud 11y agoNot accurate. Not close to accurate. 16GB models have around 10-11GB free after the OS and all default apps are installed.
- programLyrique 11y agoI am always surprised by these expansive US plans. In France for instance, you can have 50 GB LTE for 20 € per month (with Free). In Austria, 10 GB LTE for 15 € is not uncommon.
- dep_b 11y agoFrance is pretty unique and shows that in most countries telco's act as a cartel to keep prices inflated artificially.
- agumonkey 11y agoIt wasn't much different before Free mobile kick in the hive.
- Maakuth 11y agoIt's hardly unique. Here in Finland, the prices are comparable, though data caps are rare. 20€/mo gets you LTE with some bundled calls and SMS. Rest of the Nordics should be fairly similar. Currently I pay 18€/mo for my 50Mbps uncapped LTE, I use it as my home connection.
- programLyrique 11y agoFor Free, the maximum debit is 150Mbit/s, and they throttle to 128Kbit/s after the 5OGB...
- Mikeb85 11y agoThose damn socialists, with their paid vacations, short working days, good infrastructure, cheap services, and free school and healthcare. Not to mention all the wine, cheese, secularism and protesting. Heathens...
- pfortuny 11y agoWOW I SAY WOW!! No way you can get that in Spain!
- omarforgotpwd 11y agoThat's how they raise their average selling price without raising the base price. For many use cases like kiosks and classrooms little storage is needed.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agochecks Settings->General->Storage I've got 5GB free on my 16GB phone. You've explained why 16GB is not a good fit for you, but that doesn't mean it's not a good fit for anyone.
- pix64 11y agoUsing 20GB on an android phone without any music.
- acomjean 11y agoI think the use case is older people (my parents..) that mainly use it as a phone and not much else. It wasteful though as it really kills future functionality and makes the phone get tossed earlier. (although they can be recycled I'm betting a lot aren't). Especially interesting given the keynotes emphasis on recycling/renewable resources. on the plus side, they kept the headphone jack (no new headphones required).
- liviu 11y ago16GB is enought for me. I don't watch movies, I don't listen to much music and I don't install apps. Just a phone with some basic apps and internet connections. I also think 4 inches is decent size for my pocket. I think I'll buy my first iPhone soon. Good job, Apple.
- jandrese 11y agoWhy not get some Nokia candybar? It will cost a heck of a lot less than $400 and comes with some basic apps and lets you make calls.
- ghshephard 11y agoMy honest answer is: o Photostream/iCloud Photos. o Rock Solid/Fast Camera o Overcast o Tweetbot o All the IOS controls in Finger DNA
- jb1991 11y agoIf this will be your first iPhone, you've picked a good one to get started with. My first and only iPhone, after nearly 5 years, is the iPhone 4S which is seemingly an identical body as this SE. And it is a rock-solid, perfect little machine. I've dropped it countless times on brick and cement and it has no scratches on it after all this time -- never even put a case on it. These larger, thin phones that have come since have been a lot more fragile.
- watmough 11y agoI maintain that the iPhone 4S is still the finest piece of consumer electronics ever created. They really hit a home run with that one. I've since moved to a big 6S, but my 4S is still quite usable.
- cellularmitosis 11y agoThe 4S was a real landmark in UI smoothness as well, as it was the first dual-core iPhone. Previously, even if a developer was on his best behavior (putting expensive tasks on a background thread to avoid bogging down the main thread and causing a frame rate drop), it didn't really help, because you only had one hardware thread. Even though the 4S is a "slow" processor compared to the latest phones, it's UI was way more usable than the 4 and 3GS because of the second processor core.
- mtw 11y agoiPhones would be amazing if it could be expanded with microSD!
- shostack 11y agoMy 80GB 5th gen video iPod (that's right, the clickwheel one) just gave up the ghost. Right now I'm limping on with an old 4GB iPhone 3 hand-me-down that I'm using as an iPod, since my Nexus 4 doesn't have the storage, nor battery capacity to be my music listening device. At this point I've started to come to terms with the fact that for the next few years, my phone will not be able to be my primary portable music device because of storage. On that note, are there any reasonable high-capacity alternatives for a portable music device that don't require streaming? I want a small form factor, large HDD with a headphone jack and a good battery and solid interface. I'd considered a new iPod Touch, but to get even 64GB is $300, which seems a bit much. Curious what recommendations others have here.
- johnchristopher 11y agoMost other smartphone makers propose a majority of models with an SD slot. Only Apple doesn't provide any means to add more storage for cheap.
- mastazi 11y agoAnd Google Nexus...
- Zpalmtree 11y agoI'm using a fii0 x1, which has a sd card slot for up to 128gb of storage, and it has decent battery life and a very nice UI. Also has a dac for great quality sound, and supports lots of file types including flac. Bit more pricy than some cheap mp3 players, but it's very durable and will last a long time I imagine.
- lewisl9029 11y agoBeen using a FiiO X3 1st Gen here for quite a few years now, and it's still going strong. I got it before the X1 came out, and if I were to buy a new player I'd go with the X1 as well.
- nix0n 11y ago
- tambourine_man 11y agoYou can barely put a day's worth of music on your phone You can get ≈16h of 128K VBR MP3 in a single gigabyte. The real problem is video. Those guys are selling 4K devices that can barely hold a full event.
- Zpalmtree 11y ago128k is pretty awful quality though.
- tambourine_man 11y agoIt's not. You need great ears and even greater hardware to distinguish it from uncompressed in AB testing (on recent enough LAME encoder). But if you must, go 192k/256k, which is pretty much guaranteed to be indistinguishable for almost all wetware/hardware combination in the world and would still get you about 12h in a gigabyte.
- r00fus 11y agoI just wish they'd have offered 128GB as an option.
- mrweasel 11y ago>$399 USD is great It's going to be $559 in Denmark. I had to check the prices on the other models, the cheapest 6S is $875. I never realized how expensive an iPhone is. Why anyone would buy an iPhone at those prices are beyond me. Sure, most will be buying via their carrier along with a subscription, but in most cases that will just make the phone more expensive.
- ProAm 11y agoAll Apple products are significantly overpriced, how their consumers do not realize the are being taken advantage of is beyond me.
- jhenkens 11y agoDepends on how much you prefer the experience of an iPhone versus an Android. There's a reason someone might choose an Audi versus a similarly equipped (engine wise) Volkwagen - it's a different experience, at a price, that some prefer.
- theshrike79 11y agoAll Apple products hold their price very well. I just sold an iPhone 4S for 100€ yesterday - a five year old device. It still runs the latest iOS, albeit a bit slower. Show me 5 year old Android device that can run the latest Android version WITH CARRIER SUPPORT, without any 3rd party hacks or rooting.
- ricardobeat 11y agoAre they? Flagship models from the competition always cost about the same, especially on monthly plans.
- ProAm 11y agoI was speaking more to the entire apple product line. Laptops, PC's, phones. Apple users easily pay on average 1/3 more for comparable hardware. Their software used to be of higher quality, but that is no longer the case.
- devy 11y agoIt's only $60 [1] or less to replace the iPhone NAND Flash Memory from 16GB to 128GB at Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei[2], labor included. Obviously, it's advisable to do the upgrade after your warranty has expired. ;) [1] http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/03/iphone-flash-storage-upgrade-shenzhen/ http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/03/iphone-flash-storage-upgrade-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaqiangbei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaqiangbei
- samstave 11y agoThat is awesome! I wish ifixit would train some people to do this. I have an iPhone 4s that is "the kids phone" for my two-year old so she can watch YouTube and Netflix. I'd love to upgrade that so I could put all the other movies she likes on there as well.
- yuvadam 11y agoThat usually requires significant soldering experience with SMT components and can possibly require soldering a BGA which is crazy hard (up to impossible) if you're not a machine.
- devy 11y agoYup! The technicians shown in the video said they usually have around 50 "upgrades" a day done in the shop and this techniques has been around since April 2015. Worst comes to be worst, Huaqiangbei has tons of vendors who sell iPhone scrape parts so an accidental damage can be easily "replaced" and fixed up. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the technicians were Foxconn trained workers.
- samstave 11y agoAre you in China? (This is not a criticism) your grammar sounds as though you may be Chinese. I wonder how many people in the China tech scene read HN?
- 11y ago
- dfar1 11y agoSo that you can continue to pay for icloud.
- itake 11y agosomeone I know at apple told me that they have trouble getting enough memory for the millions of phones that they sell.
- peyton 11y agoIn addition to making a buck through market segmentation, there are probably challenges sourcing NAND flash that meets Apple's power/performance requirements in sufficient quantities.
- joelhaasnoot 11y agoI wonder how well this will work: wife has an iPhone 5C but hates it because it's an 8GB model. Facebook already takes up 500MB with its caches and she's constantly removing apps. Pictures also take up room - with Photo Stream on there are 4 copies of each pic on your phone...
- ebiester 11y agoMight I suggest removing Facebook the app and instead have a link to their mobile app? It might be worth a shot.
- joelhaasnoot 11y agoI tried to convince her to do that, but it's the app she uses most with various groups and such.
- notatoad 11y agoBecause 16GB is enough for me. I don't need more space than that, so why should i pay for it?
- jasonkostempski 11y agoI bet if people started booing during these live streams when they announce that BS they'd stop doing it real quick.
- cweiss 11y agoThey'd also be uninvited from future Apple events. These aren't generally open to the public.
- rsp1984 11y agoUSD 399 for an unlocked new iPhone (with latest hardware!) in an of itself is a great, almost revolutionary price regardless of storage capacity. To the degree where I actually wonder whether it's going to have negative effects on their iPhone 6(s) sales. I'm sure Apple has been running very sophisticated simulations on different model pricing, but 399 has so far been really the ballpark of Android phones. Therefore I think what we're observing here is nothing less than the beginning of a new phase of iPhone strategy: They are starting to reach down from the top into the middle class segment whereas everybody else in the smartphone industry is trying to move up segments (so far with very limited success). Now Apple's brand is playing for them as they move down whereas everybody else's brand is playing against them as they want to move up.
- skizm 11y agoI assumed it was 16gb because that obviously isn't enough and then they basically force you to spend another $100 for the next bump up in storage, which costs them essentially nothing. Most people will buy the more expensive version, but they can advertise the lower price.
- themartorana 11y agoFunny how they pushed iMessage as getting around an obvious cash grab by carriers and then push this obvious cash grab. Wait. No, it's not funny. It's really frustrating in 2016. And pretty transparent.
- oldmanjay 11y ago"and then" implies a sequence of events that doesn't match reality. This has been the price structure for iOS devices for many years. In any case, I don't think Apple has moral qualms making cash grabs, being that they are so into profit.
- cweiss 11y agoThere's plenty of use cases for low-storage iPhones. Think enterprise customers, mobile point-of-sale devices, field researchers, reporters.
- Cacti 11y ago> why are we still stuck with 16 GB of storage on base model phones Because upgrades are where they make most of their money.
- mattlutze 11y agohttps://discussions.apple.com/thread/1385624?start=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1385624?start=0 (Find Nathan C's answer) If the math is still accurate and figure half your storage is music (7GB) we're talking 750-1750 songs. At 2.5 minute average runtime, 750 songs would be ~78 minutes of music per hour over 24 hours. So, you could skip 5 songs and still fill an entire day. And if you figure average 4 minute runtime like that poster did, that's 125 minutes of music per hour, or skipping 1/2 of the songs that come up. A lot of folks aren't power users and don't need big storage on the phone. It's okay to offer them an option.
- rorykoehler 11y agoThat's part of the reason I switched to Android. I spend $250, get a micro sd slot and pretty much all the features I want or would use. The camera is the only thing I miss from the iphone but it's not the end of the world as the camera in the Android isn't exactly terrible. Coincidentally it's also why I went off contract. Much cheaper to buy phone outright and buy 3gb of pay as you go data a month than get locked into an absurd and useless contract.