Apple's 16GB iPhones are a big fat lie, claims iOS 8 storage hog lawsuit Apple is being sued by fans upset about how much storage space iOS takes up on their iPhones, iPads and iPods. A class-action lawsuit (PDF), filed in California by Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, alleged the OS uses so much flash memory that the advertised device capacity is misleading. The sueball was lobbed at Cupertino …
A little like a bull in a china shop, Bob? Apple has always been know for its Mother-Hen attitude in protecting its users, vetting everything that goes on an iDevice and charging a premium for the service. The folks that cling to Apple, it's exorbitant prices and its censorship do so for a reason.
These poor saps that thought they could use 8 and 16GB iDevices for storing large libraries of music are either playing stupid, or they are are stupid. If you want to have the freedom of buying large storage at reasonable prices or doing what you really want to with your device, you need to be brave enough to break away from Mother Apple.
"If you want to have the freedom of buying large storage at reasonable prices or doing what you really want to with your device, you need to be brave enough to break away from Mother Apple."
I bought a 128GB iPhone. The price was reasonable, in the sense that I was happy paying it. Perhaps it was higher than other 128GB phones, but none of them come with iOS.
And as for the freedom to do what I want with my device, well I can. Everything I want to do with it, I can do. I tried an Android once. It was 1000 questions every time I used it, fifteen different apps for each function, no UI consistency. I had less freedom to use it because the damned thing was so fiddly.
Point being, you may not see the point of Apple devices and consider them overpriced, but there are many who disagree with you and are happy to pony up. Not all of us see our phones as pocket computers and toys - some of us want to use them like appliances and are happy to pay a premium for that experience.
AC: >>"The folks that cling to Apple, it's exorbitant prices and its censorship do so for a reason."
Yes, they don't want to admit they made a tragic mistake.<<
No, they got it right. You seem to think that people who buy Apple are stupid or something. Well, I know computing theory and what goes on in the industry really well along with a lot of others who are certainly not just 'dumb' users. We know that computing systems should be designed to not burden the user with the details of running a computer - that is just moving work from one place to another.
Many IT people who have a job running round after IBM and Windows junk don't like that and put up all of this nonsense against Apple and equivalents.
You assessment of tragic mistake is tragically wrong.
SQL God: >>Apple has always been know for its Mother-Hen attitude in protecting its users, vetting everything that goes on an iDevice and charging a premium for the service. The folks that cling to Apple, it's exorbitant prices and its censorship do so for a reason.<<
Garbage. What Apple is known for is making computers directly useful to non-technical people, not to tech heads or to non-techs with an army of technical support to fix up the mess.
Apple protects its users from malicious people - that could be overt as one who wants to put viruses on your system, compromise your data, or more subtle ones, such as those who want your details for marketing campaigns.
Apple does a good and successful job at that - their users are not inflicted with numerous viruses and worms, etc.
As for exorbitant prices? You can't buy cut price machines which you then have to add so much to and then pay for expensive software like Microsoft Office. You get iWork (a very capable package which does 99% of what you want) for free. If you look beyond the purchase price of the box, Apple will most often work out a cheaper buy.
Then there is TCO. You spend less overhead time in running and maintaining your computer - that's things the OS should do. Then you are far less likely to be affected by malicious software as I have already explained.
So there is a very good reason for sticking to Apple - it IS far better. You can get on with your work and life and NOT have to be a tech nerd.
you mean it will force manufacturers to claim how much bloat will be taken up? whilst the suit is pretty silly it is a bit of a stiff for some people with ipods to lose almost a quarter of claimed space with no way to expand it. Other MP3 esque devices might have uSD cards so at least it isn't a problem, same with most other phones - sure some wont have uSD slots so they are boned too.
What's worse is memory bloat.
My iphone 3g no longer runs Stanza. After an OS upgrade, stanza loads, freezes and then crashes.
Maps takes several minutes to register key-presses and pretty much nothing runs afterwards.
Yes its old, but it used to work just fine before the OS upgrade.
I'd like to see RAM figures included in the specs, on the websites.
I have several devices that don't let you expand your memory, or limit it to a fixed amount.
But, then pretty much every OS release on every device I have ever come across since the 90s takes up more memory than the previous version, long gone are the days when vendors released performance updates with more efficient code, taking up less space.
Come back assembler, all is forgiven, I'll gladly pay $10,000 for my next iPhone tightly coded in machine code.
don't forget though that you pretty much have to update the ios otherwise previous programs might not work - certainly updates wont. Whilst reasonable to expect what isn't reasonable is to lose another 5% without a choice.
That being said, watch what happens to windows when it gets hold of updates, good luck to those with 32Gb windows tablets - not much room left on those after full updates (especially if office is installed!)
If only Apple knew about flash memory technology, then they could put a Micro SD card slot on their products, and users would not be limited to the memory supplied with the phone. Most other manufacturers seem to know about it. I suppose its possible that Apple does know of it, but wants to make a killing on over charging for the internal flash memory. No. Surely not. This great company worshipped by millions would not do such a crappy thing to their loyal customers? Or would they?
This is par for the course with how Apple designs products. It is far more important that they maximize their profit than to make the product useful and usable. So no SD cards as then people wouldn't pay the exorbitant Apple storage tax to move up to larger storage. Similarly there are the proprietary connectors so that you can only use overpriced accessories due to the the Apple accessory tax.
>>So no SD cards as then people wouldn't pay the exorbitant Apple storage tax to move up to larger storage.
Nonsense. Even the fastest uSD cards have pathetic random-write speeds (think ~3 MB/s) which is something apps do frequently, and they burn out after only a few thousand rewrites, so it's no mystery why you run into so many Android users complaining about failed SD cards. And left to their own devices, consumers are NOT going to buy the fastest and best SD cards, they're going to buy $5 cards from the Fry's check-out bins which will be even slower and fail even faster.
So why would Apple open themselves up to a situation where users can install their own s****y memory which will almost certainly result in unacceptable performance and probably data loss?
Anonymous Coward wrote :"This is par for the course with how Apple designs products. It is far more important that they maximize their profit than to make the product useful and usable. So no SD cards as then people wouldn't pay the exorbitant Apple storage ta..."
No wonder you post as anonymous coward - what you write is complete and utter rubbish. I have written elsewhere in this thread that there is no shortage of idiots like you who want to hold on to the old industry where computers rule people. Apple changed that to people rule and use computers. There are still many people who resent that.
The power of the IT professional is broken - get over it.
I have android devices (as well as an iphone 6+) and yes, they have a microSD cards but they're not that useful:
- Google Play Music claims to store my tracks on the SD card but I regularly find it's been using 1GB or more of the main flash storage
- Apps can't be stored on the SD card
- Apps that download data after downloading the app don't always seem to ask where I'd like it stored.
Consequently, my Sony tablet for example keeps telling me my device memory (the 10GB or so left of the 16GB that Sony advertises) is more than 75% full and I should move items to the SD card. It offers a little app to do it for me, and it moves precisely nothing, because it can't.
My samsung phone is so cocking awful (Galaxy s3) that it always has free storage, mainly because I try to use the phone as little as possible anyway. I'm now on my third SD card, and I've given up as all of them are now "damaged or corrupted" and the stupid phone refuses to ever use them again, and plugging them into a PC confirms that they're now faulty.
So they all do it. Look at Windows (!). I installed Windows 8 on a 64GB SSD and it gradually filled up with temporary files, bits of service pack, bits of update and basically crap.
But yes, all manufacturers should say how much space their OS takes up. In the case of Windows, Microsoft should fess up and say it needs at the very least a 120GB SSD to work properly for more than a few months.
Any equipment I buy must have external storage - and excludes CLOUD, I don't want to share my stuff with the NSA and GCHQ.
@Anthony Hegedus:
"I have android devices and yes, they have a microSD cards but they're not that useful:"
What a crock. SD memory configuration is established by the manufacturer. Note 4 can handle up to 128Gbyte.
You shouldn't be so cheap when buying SD cards - a couple of percent more can buy you a lifetime warranty.
My wife loads her Note with Bittorent movies, leaves her Note in Hotspot mode in the dining room of our hotel dining room and the guests can down load their choices for the next leg of their journey.
SD work well, if you know how to use them.
In the Android world SD-support seems to be getting worse and worse due to explicit steps taken by Google. As of 4.4 for instance, it takes some non-trivial preparation (partitioning SD, formatting specifically, etc.) to get programs like Link2SD and others to work (these apps move/manage items to SD; the builtin support just isn't there anymore). Google seems to have figured that Apple gets away with such ahole-ery and makes boatloads of $$$ doing it, so why not....and the changes don't seem to be something custom ROMs (another non-trivial thing to do for 99% of users) can make go away...
>that's odd, my galaxy S2 with cyanogen
Well, I think we are talking vendor android, here. Not everyone has the time or expertise to do that.
Since you installed cyanogen, you damn well knew that the vendor android version does not like using the sd card for apps. So, cut the crap. Android is cool for techies, sucks for the rest ... serious business users go with Blackberry 10, the rest use iPhones ...
"My samsung phone is so cocking awful (Galaxy s3) that it always has free storage, mainly because I try to use the phone as little as possible anyway. I'm now on my third SD card, and I've given up as all of them are now "damaged or corrupted" and the stupid phone refuses to ever use them again, and plugging them into a PC confirms that they're now faulty."
Means you have bought cheap shitty fake cards...
Fail to see how that's Samsung's fault...
Actually I buy Kingston and sandisk, never cheap sd cards. And that's not the reason my s3 is cocking awful. It's just cocking awful. I could explain why if enough people really want to know.
But my point is that as it comes, you are limited in what you can actually store on SD cards in android. Yes, you can store torrented movies but why does google play insist on using main storage when it even has a setting to use the SD card? And why do games not let you store their huge data files on SD card? Why can't programs be stored on SD card?
>>I have android devices (as well as an iphone 6+) and yes, they have a microSD cards but they're not that useful:
I'm glad somebody said this.
A friend of mine with an Android phone was running out of memory. No problem, his phone has a microSD card slot, so he picked up a card. After probably an hour of fidgeting, the best we could do was get the phone to store new photos on the card. No music or apps or anything else. Supremely disappointed with this supposed advantage of Android phones.
'A friend of mine with an Android phone was running out of memory. No problem, his phone has a microSD card slot, so he picked up a card. After probably an hour of fidgeting, the best we could do was get the phone to store new photos on the card. No music or apps or anything else. Supremely disappointed with this supposed advantage of Android phones.'
You probably shouldn't be on an IT site then, I found it trivially easy and haven't actually worked in IT in over a decade and my Dad, who normally calls me before pressing print in Word just in case, has also managed it without any assistance.
>>You probably shouldn't be on an IT site then, I found it trivially easy and haven't actually worked in IT in over a decade and my Dad, who normally calls me before pressing print in Word just in case, has also managed it without any assistance.
Managed what, exactly?
Moving e.g. Google Play music to the "external" SD card? I see that's now officially supported in Kit Kat, which my friend doesn't have and there's not an official update for his phone yet. So, great. Thanks for your insight.
Yes you've hit the nail on the head here. But I think that Android should go a several steps beyond what it's currently doing: how about you plug in an SD card and the OS works out which apps to move, informs the user and then actually moves them and their data (and their caches) over to the SD card?
Now someone is going to tell me that that's something that microsoft's thing does.
>>Now someone is going to tell me that that's something that microsoft's thing does.
Funny you mention that, because Windows Phone does (or at least did) merge its main memory with the SD card memory.
Problem was, it caused no end of problems and a jillion customer complaints because the phones with SD cards installed would "crash" all the time.
Turns out the SD card memory was performing so poorly that the OS's watchdog timers for performance were being triggered and the OS was force-quitting apps to try to get things running again.
"Funny you mention that, because Windows Phone does (or at least did) merge its main memory with the SD card memory."
Nope - Windows Phone has never done that. External storage is selectable, not merged.
"Problem was, it caused no end of problems and a jillion customer complaints because the phones with SD cards installed would "crash" all the time."
Never heard of this or had any issues with uSD cards and have been using Windows Phone since launch - Citation needed...
Anonymous Coward >>"Funny you mention that, because Windows Phone does (or at least did) merge its main memory with the SD card memory."
Nope - Windows Phone has never done that. External storage is selectable, not merged.<<
That is exposing the memory hierarchy - which is an implementation detail - to the user. You probably don't understand what Apple has done (or is doing) or will argue against it as an old techie. Apple stores you data safely where ever. The user does not have to think about where or more importantly, how. Users no longer think in terms of lower-level abstractions such as files to store entities.
On iOS, there is no 'save' - whatever you are working on is automatically saved to SSD. Save is being deemphasized on OS X.
Programmers also should not think about memory hierarchy - they should not think about moving data from main memory to registers or where data gets allocated. That is a real backward move in Dalvik (Android's OS), where Google has exposed registers in the memory hierarchy.
Apple is going in the right direction here.
Ten years ago Symbian gave you the choice of where to install, including directly to the SD card without any need to link to the internal filesystem. You could change SD cards and the menu would update accordingly. If an SD card corrupted it would tell you, you could remove it, and the phone returned to its normal speed and operation.
The only thing that perhaps needed improving was you couldn't move apps, just uninstall from internal memory and reinstall to SD card.
I refuse to believe Google or Apple have tried their best to sort this problem out.
>>Your friend chose the wrong person to try and help then. If you can't get your music on to the SD card you have no business touching hardware.
I can fill the SD card to the brim with MP3 files no problem. How do I get my friend's pre-Kit Kat Google music app to play them? Oh, you can't? I guess you might not be as helpful as you thought.
@AC
"I can fill the SD card to the brim with MP3 files no problem. How do I get my friend's pre-Kit Kat Google music app to play them? Oh, you can't? I guess you might not be as helpful as you thought."
Took the micro SD from a broken MP3 player, inserted into my old Orange San Francisco, 4 years-old and running Android 2.2, turned it on, opened Play Music, and the songs and audio books appeared instantly. Music on the root of card, books each in their own folders. Absolutely no problem at all.
Not sure how it could be any easier.
On my pre kitkat S3 mini just loading the music on the card is enough for the music app to pick it up...
But just for shits and giggles I've just installed the google music app. All of my music is on the SD card, copied there using a card reader not the phone. Open Google music app. Press the little three line menu button. Press "MyLibrary" button. All my music available.
Wow. Very difficult.
Oh, guess I might be helpful after all, but my previous assertion was wrong. It's not just hardware you shouldn't touching.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
