It's a bit unfair for any company to say you have a 16 gig device by implying you have 16 gigs of stuff to put on it. They should have actual amount available. It can't be that hard to be upfront. Ho hum.
There are going to be different amounts of open memory for each individual device, depending on what a user might install. Free space will change, one way or another, to a greater or lesser amount, depending on which version of an OS happens to be installed on a given device, which language is in use, etc etc etc.
Yes, it really is hard to be that specific.
This is nothing new, and has been the case since digital computers with internal storage were invented, and applies to everything from handheld devices to enterprise server farms.
Last day of the year! The lawyers had to make a quota on number of suits that need to be filled for last quarter/end of year. This is bogus and has been visited many time over and over. Once again a waste of tax-payers money. Maybe the judicial system should charge back the law firms to recover the public cost for frivolous (false claims) suits like this. I bet there would be dramatic stop to all non-sense cases.
Yes, I would agree to one of the comment above - Maybe Apple should stop selling 16GB phones. The minimum should be 32GB, because iOS is getting fatter.
Likewise. I suggest you read the complaint. They are not making the case that Apple is misrepresenting anything by using GB versus GiB. Their claim is that iOS 8 takes up a "unexpectedly" large portion of the advertised "16GB."
They have unrealistic expectations. Apparently, to them, a smartphone is a magical device; they don't understand that the machine functions in part by executing instructions stored in memory, said instructions taking up some variable amount of space in that memory. It's all magic to them.
And now they're trying to blame someone else for their own ignorance.
IMHO no iPhone should be made with less than 32 GIGs these days witness the update mess iOS 8 caused for many with over the air failures, which is so un Apple. Storage costs at those low levels must surely be way down now.
But that's not Apple's model. Unlike the non-Apple devices on that chart, iPhones cannot simply plug in a 32 Gig card and expand the storage on the phone when it gets full. And that's what I think is at the heart of this lawsuit. You hit the nail on the head when you said the over-the-air updates are thwarted because people using 8GB or 16GB phones often keep them brimming with data. I recently upgraded to a 64GB iPhone and can finally breath a sigh of relief after only using 16GB models since the original iPhone. Not only could I not upgrade over air, I could not shoot new movies, I often had to clean out pictures and apps to make room for more. My phone became a constant data management burden. Indeed, iOS needs a certain amount of free space in order to operate smoothly.
But unlike Samsung and others, Apple wants you to buy storage in iCloud and keep your files in the cloud. So its a recurring expense rather than a simple one-time hardware upgrade. My guess is this is at the heart of the matter. When I grew up it was consumer beware. Today, consumers are entitled. Unfortunately when they commit to an 8GB or 16GB device, they don't fully understand what that really means to them, and then have no recourse when they hit the wall, whereas Samsung would just sell them a relatively cheap memory card.
An interesting point. At the dawn of computers, I think one had to install the OS oneself and, later on, there were choices of OS you could load. So describing the hardware did not involve outlining the potential space lost when an OS was installed. Even today, with a Mac, the ordinary user can run MacOS, or Linux, or even Windows. However, on an iPhone, I don't believe the ordinary user can run anything other than iOS. In effect, the OS storage overhead should be part of the description of the hardware. Today's telephones are a different product being marketed, so the standards used at the "dawn of computers" really shouldn't apply. Even fifteen years ago, cell phones of the day would tell you upfront at purchase that you could store only 20 txt messages and 100 contacts in the directory (for example). It was precious space, and if the advertised numbers were wrong, I think it would have been misleading. Somehow modern smartphone makers like Samsung now think it's legitimate to sell their phones based upon a capacity figure that is incorrect by a large margin, since onboard systems must use much of it. I recall that a year or two ago we here on AI were making light of Samsung for using over half the advertised storage for the OS and preloaded software on their phones. I believed then that a lawsuit was in order. I still believe it. Alas, Apple is the one making the most money, and since they are similarly guilty, though by much less of a margin, I can see why the lawyers are suing them instead of Samsung. FWIW, many other brands of smartphone do allow add-on memory cards. Apple should have seen this coming. Lawyers always sue the deepest pockets.
Smartphones are much closer to computers than to cell phones. Many cell phones users are not computer savvy but they seem to learn how to treat their phones like computers. Maybe Apple should step up and lead the industry in warning naive users that some storage will be used by the Operating System and other apps depending on what the users choose to load. The Judge should award the complainants a dollar apiece and let the lawyers squabble over splitting it up.
We have 7000 iPhones supplied by my employer where I work, allmost all 16GB. This is not considered a problem, and a very tiny amount of our employees take opportunity of an offer to pay a modest amount out of their own pocket for a larger memory.
I won't use company phone to take personal pictures and download movies on there. Why need more than 16gb? even 8gb is sufficient.
They have unrealistic expectations. Apparently, to them, a smartphone is a magical device; they don't understand that the machine functions in part by executing instructions stored in memory, said instructions taking up some variable amount of space in that memory. It's all magic to them.
And now they're trying to blame someone else for their own ignorance.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I know plenty of people who never understood the difference between system memory (RAM) and storage, so it's not obvious what "the average consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances" (the legal standard in California apparently) believes. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this mythical person may believe they can put 16GB of their stuff on a 16GB device.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I know plenty of people who never understood the difference between system memory (RAM) and storage, so it's not obvious what "the average consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances" (the legal standard in California apparently) believes. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this mythical person may believe they can put 16GB of their stuff on a 16GB device.
And some people still believe that the world is flat. It may not be nice to point and snicker at them, but it surely is tempting.
They have unrealistic expectations. Apparently, to them, a smartphone is a magical device; they don't understand that the machine functions in part by executing instructions stored in memory, said instructions taking up some variable amount of space in that memory. It's all magic to them.
And now they're trying to blame someone else for their own ignorance.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I know plenty of people who never understood the difference between system memory (RAM) and storage, so it's not obvious what "the average consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances" (the legal standard in California apparently) believes. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this mythical person may believe they can put 16GB of their stuff on a 16GB device.
If they don't understand that device storage includes core files, then it is unlikely that they have any clue what 16 GB even means in the first place. There are plenty of device specifications that the average consumer definitely doesn't comprehend, but that is not a license to invent their own explanation and then sue when it turns out to be incorrect.
But that's not Apple's model. Unlike the non-Apple devices on that chart, iPhones cannot simply plug in a 32 Gig card and expand the storage on the phone when it gets full. And that's what I think is at the heart of this lawsuit. You hit the nail on the head when you said the over-the-air updates are thwarted because people using 8GB or 16GB phones often keep them brimming with data. I recently upgraded to a 64GB iPhone and can finally breath a sigh of relief after only using 16GB models since the original iPhone. Not only could I not upgrade over air, I could not shoot new movies, I often had to clean out pictures and apps to make room for more. My phone became a constant data management burden. Indeed, iOS needs a certain amount of free space in order to operate smoothly.
But unlike Samsung and others, Apple wants you to buy storage in iCloud and keep your files in the cloud. So its a recurring expense rather than a simple one-time hardware upgrade. My guess is this is at the heart of the matter. When I grew up it was consumer beware. Today, consumers are entitled. Unfortunately when they commit to an 8GB or 16GB device, they don't fully understand what that really means to them, and then have no recourse when they hit the wall, whereas Samsung would just sell them a relatively cheap memory card.
You are making an assumption there though, i.e. that Apple keep the storage in the phones low so as to force iCloud use. I am not convinced there is such a direct connection. Yes the storage is too low and yes they want to get users on to cloud storage .... but even with multiple TBs of storage on my Macs I use clouds a lot.
BTW, I am guessing the issue with allowing add on storage could be that it opens the door to malware being added that way much like USB does. Personally I am all for the walled garden. BUT I would like to see larger storage space from Apple on all iDevices with 32 GIGs as a minimum at present.
This law suit is bogus...Its like saying "I was sold a 1500 sq ft home and only got 1300 because the bath tubs, kitchen counters and HVAC gear that were installed along with the footprint of the internal walls took up 200! Any reasonable person would expect the fundamental software of the system to reside on the devices storage, its been that way for what? 30 years since we got built in HDDs in workstations and went away from the floppy only model.
On one hand, all these companies involved should be clear about how much space is free in these devices rather than how much data the device can store.
On the other hand, I'd bet good money that the vast majority of people who have a good understanding of what 1 GB is in terms of data storage also know that the operating system and pre-existing data on a device require storage.
It seems like a legitimate problem which is now being addressed with a predatory weapon.
I don't think this suit has merit. You are getting the capacity advertised. Nowhere is Apple advertising "free space". They are advertising capacity, and the devices have the capacity stated.
If you wanted to file a lawsuit, you'd have better luck suing them for secretly downloading multi-GB OS installers without your consent. On a 16 GB device that is a sizable amount of wasted space that serves no function. My wife has run into this several times on her 16 GB iPad. She wants to download a movie and all of a sudden there is 2-3 GB less free space than there was just a couple days earlier. You can delete the installer if you know where to go in Settings, but 90% of users won't know what happened to their free space and how to recover it.
I don't think this suit has merit. You are getting the capacity advertised. Nowhere is Apple advertising "free space". They are advertising capacity, and the devices have the capacity stated.
If you wanted to file a lawsuit, you'd have better luck suing them for secretly downloading multi-GB OS installers without your consent. On a 16 GB device that is a sizable amount of wasted space that serves no function. My wife has run into this several times on her 16 GB iPad. She wants to download a movie and all of a sudden there is 2-3 GB less free space than there was just a couple days earlier. You can delete the installer if you know where to go in Settings, but 90% of users won't know what happened to their free space and how to recover it.
Maybe the lawsuit will be deemed without merit, but can you really argue that there's no disconnect here?
When you buy that 16 GB iPhone you absolutely are not getting 16 GBs. All you get to do anything meaningful with is whatever is left over of that 16 GB after any storage required for the device to run is subtracted. And there's another major issue here, though not represented directly in the lawsuit: Apple sells 8 GB devices which for many casual users will not be sufficient free space to install future updates without some technical assistance. They certainly would not understand why updating through iTunes might work after updating on their device failed, or simply may not know they have other options.
Truth be told, for those familiar with a relatively moderate level of technology, which will include many in this forum, there's nothing taking place here which would seem out of the ordinary. But for the layman, that 16 GB that appears on electronic devices like a mobile phone (far from just an Apple thing) is a misleading number. And that's a number which becomes far more misleading the more it shrinks (8 GB is much lower in practice than being half of 16 GB).
Assuming that chart is accurate and I have no reason to doubt it, you hit the nail on the head. The law suit is going after the wrong company even assuming it made sense which it doesn't.
That said, IMHO no iPhone should be made with less than 32 GIGs these days witness the update mess iOS 8 caused for many with over the air failures, which is so un Apple. Storage costs at those low levels must surely be way down now. Heck, all my Camera flash cards are 32 and 64 GIGs these days. SSD seems to be holding high prices for far too long (don't even mention my nMac Pro and SSD costs .... aaaggghhh) but Flash is cheap now.
Working in enterprise IT, I would ask, why should I spend the extra for 32GB on 1000+ handsets when 8GB works just fine for email, texting and most every other enterprise mobility tool we run? If 8gb isnt good for your use case buy the bigger one...
I am reminded of something my grand father said to me when i was like 5 or 6 - "It is the job of the shop keeper to sell you what is on his shelf, it is your responsibility to know what you need and get that and nothing more or less."
Comments
Why? It's not like it's a new issue?
I've stated it over 4 pages; mostly to you in various ways. There are only a limited number of ways I can state the same info again and again.
It's a bit unfair for any company to say you have a 16 gig device by implying you have 16 gigs of stuff to put on it. They should have actual amount available. It can't be that hard to be upfront. Ho hum.
There are going to be different amounts of open memory for each individual device, depending on what a user might install. Free space will change, one way or another, to a greater or lesser amount, depending on which version of an OS happens to be installed on a given device, which language is in use, etc etc etc.
Yes, it really is hard to be that specific.
This is nothing new, and has been the case since digital computers with internal storage were invented, and applies to everything from handheld devices to enterprise server farms.
Last day of the year! The lawyers had to make a quota on number of suits that need to be filled for last quarter/end of year. This is bogus and has been visited many time over and over. Once again a waste of tax-payers money. Maybe the judicial system should charge back the law firms to recover the public cost for frivolous (false claims) suits like this. I bet there would be dramatic stop to all non-sense cases.
Yes, I would agree to one of the comment above - Maybe Apple should stop selling 16GB phones. The minimum should be 32GB, because iOS is getting fatter.
Likewise. I suggest you read the complaint. They are not making the case that Apple is misrepresenting anything by using GB versus GiB. Their claim is that iOS 8 takes up a "unexpectedly" large portion of the advertised "16GB."
They have unrealistic expectations. Apparently, to them, a smartphone is a magical device; they don't understand that the machine functions in part by executing instructions stored in memory, said instructions taking up some variable amount of space in that memory. It's all magic to them.
And now they're trying to blame someone else for their own ignorance.
IMHO no iPhone should be made with less than 32 GIGs these days witness the update mess iOS 8 caused for many with over the air failures, which is so un Apple. Storage costs at those low levels must surely be way down now.
But that's not Apple's model. Unlike the non-Apple devices on that chart, iPhones cannot simply plug in a 32 Gig card and expand the storage on the phone when it gets full. And that's what I think is at the heart of this lawsuit. You hit the nail on the head when you said the over-the-air updates are thwarted because people using 8GB or 16GB phones often keep them brimming with data. I recently upgraded to a 64GB iPhone and can finally breath a sigh of relief after only using 16GB models since the original iPhone. Not only could I not upgrade over air, I could not shoot new movies, I often had to clean out pictures and apps to make room for more. My phone became a constant data management burden. Indeed, iOS needs a certain amount of free space in order to operate smoothly.
But unlike Samsung and others, Apple wants you to buy storage in iCloud and keep your files in the cloud. So its a recurring expense rather than a simple one-time hardware upgrade. My guess is this is at the heart of the matter. When I grew up it was consumer beware. Today, consumers are entitled. Unfortunately when they commit to an 8GB or 16GB device, they don't fully understand what that really means to them, and then have no recourse when they hit the wall, whereas Samsung would just sell them a relatively cheap memory card.
An interesting point. At the dawn of computers, I think one had to install the OS oneself and, later on, there were choices of OS you could load. So describing the hardware did not involve outlining the potential space lost when an OS was installed. Even today, with a Mac, the ordinary user can run MacOS, or Linux, or even Windows. However, on an iPhone, I don't believe the ordinary user can run anything other than iOS. In effect, the OS storage overhead should be part of the description of the hardware. Today's telephones are a different product being marketed, so the standards used at the "dawn of computers" really shouldn't apply. Even fifteen years ago, cell phones of the day would tell you upfront at purchase that you could store only 20 txt messages and 100 contacts in the directory (for example). It was precious space, and if the advertised numbers were wrong, I think it would have been misleading. Somehow modern smartphone makers like Samsung now think it's legitimate to sell their phones based upon a capacity figure that is incorrect by a large margin, since onboard systems must use much of it. I recall that a year or two ago we here on AI were making light of Samsung for using over half the advertised storage for the OS and preloaded software on their phones. I believed then that a lawsuit was in order. I still believe it. Alas, Apple is the one making the most money, and since they are similarly guilty, though by much less of a margin, I can see why the lawyers are suing them instead of Samsung. FWIW, many other brands of smartphone do allow add-on memory cards. Apple should have seen this coming. Lawyers always sue the deepest pockets.
Smartphones are much closer to computers than to cell phones. Many cell phones users are not computer savvy but they seem to learn how to treat their phones like computers. Maybe Apple should step up and lead the industry in warning naive users that some storage will be used by the Operating System and other apps depending on what the users choose to load. The Judge should award the complainants a dollar apiece and let the lawyers squabble over splitting it up.
Talk for yourself!
We have 7000 iPhones supplied by my employer where I work, allmost all 16GB. This is not considered a problem, and a very tiny amount of our employees take opportunity of an offer to pay a modest amount out of their own pocket for a larger memory.
I won't use company phone to take personal pictures and download movies on there. Why need more than 16gb? even 8gb is sufficient.
I've stated it over 4 pages; mostly to you in various ways. There are only a limited number of ways I can state the same info again and again.
Apparently the number is zero.
I don't think I've every been in such a heated argument (on one side at least) with someone when we appear to agree on the substantive point.
They have unrealistic expectations. Apparently, to them, a smartphone is a magical device; they don't understand that the machine functions in part by executing instructions stored in memory, said instructions taking up some variable amount of space in that memory. It's all magic to them.
And now they're trying to blame someone else for their own ignorance.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I know plenty of people who never understood the difference between system memory (RAM) and storage, so it's not obvious what "the average consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances" (the legal standard in California apparently) believes. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this mythical person may believe they can put 16GB of their stuff on a 16GB device.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I know plenty of people who never understood the difference between system memory (RAM) and storage, so it's not obvious what "the average consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances" (the legal standard in California apparently) believes. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this mythical person may believe they can put 16GB of their stuff on a 16GB device.
And some people still believe that the world is flat. It may not be nice to point and snicker at them, but it surely is tempting.
They have unrealistic expectations. Apparently, to them, a smartphone is a magical device; they don't understand that the machine functions in part by executing instructions stored in memory, said instructions taking up some variable amount of space in that memory. It's all magic to them.
And now they're trying to blame someone else for their own ignorance.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I know plenty of people who never understood the difference between system memory (RAM) and storage, so it's not obvious what "the average consumer acting reasonably under the circumstances" (the legal standard in California apparently) believes. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this mythical person may believe they can put 16GB of their stuff on a 16GB device.
If they don't understand that device storage includes core files, then it is unlikely that they have any clue what 16 GB even means in the first place. There are plenty of device specifications that the average consumer definitely doesn't comprehend, but that is not a license to invent their own explanation and then sue when it turns out to be incorrect.
You are making an assumption there though, i.e. that Apple keep the storage in the phones low so as to force iCloud use. I am not convinced there is such a direct connection. Yes the storage is too low and yes they want to get users on to cloud storage .... but even with multiple TBs of storage on my Macs I use clouds a lot.
BTW, I am guessing the issue with allowing add on storage could be that it opens the door to malware being added that way much like USB does. Personally I am all for the walled garden.
This law suit is bogus...Its like saying "I was sold a 1500 sq ft home and only got 1300 because the bath tubs, kitchen counters and HVAC gear that were installed along with the footprint of the internal walls took up 200! Any reasonable person would expect the fundamental software of the system to reside on the devices storage, its been that way for what? 30 years since we got built in HDDs in workstations and went away from the floppy only model.
On the other hand, I'd bet good money that the vast majority of people who have a good understanding of what 1 GB is in terms of data storage also know that the operating system and pre-existing data on a device require storage.
It seems like a legitimate problem which is now being addressed with a predatory weapon.
I don't think this suit has merit. You are getting the capacity advertised. Nowhere is Apple advertising "free space". They are advertising capacity, and the devices have the capacity stated.
If you wanted to file a lawsuit, you'd have better luck suing them for secretly downloading multi-GB OS installers without your consent. On a 16 GB device that is a sizable amount of wasted space that serves no function. My wife has run into this several times on her 16 GB iPad. She wants to download a movie and all of a sudden there is 2-3 GB less free space than there was just a couple days earlier. You can delete the installer if you know where to go in Settings, but 90% of users won't know what happened to their free space and how to recover it.
You didn't pay $300 + $50/month to try to access the tooth fairy. If you had it would have been fraud on the part of the person selling it to you.
The psychological damage he suffered is unimaginable.
When you buy that 16 GB iPhone you absolutely are not getting 16 GBs. All you get to do anything meaningful with is whatever is left over of that 16 GB after any storage required for the device to run is subtracted. And there's another major issue here, though not represented directly in the lawsuit: Apple sells 8 GB devices which for many casual users will not be sufficient free space to install future updates without some technical assistance. They certainly would not understand why updating through iTunes might work after updating on their device failed, or simply may not know they have other options.
Truth be told, for those familiar with a relatively moderate level of technology, which will include many in this forum, there's nothing taking place here which would seem out of the ordinary. But for the layman, that 16 GB that appears on electronic devices like a mobile phone (far from just an Apple thing) is a misleading number. And that's a number which becomes far more misleading the more it shrinks (8 GB is much lower in practice than being half of 16 GB).
Assuming that chart is accurate and I have no reason to doubt it, you hit the nail on the head. The law suit is going after the wrong company even assuming it made sense which it doesn't.
That said, IMHO no iPhone should be made with less than 32 GIGs these days witness the update mess iOS 8 caused for many with over the air failures, which is so un Apple. Storage costs at those low levels must surely be way down now. Heck, all my Camera flash cards are 32 and 64 GIGs these days. SSD seems to be holding high prices for far too long (don't even mention my nMac Pro and SSD costs .... aaaggghhh) but Flash is cheap now.
Working in enterprise IT, I would ask, why should I spend the extra for 32GB on 1000+ handsets when 8GB works just fine for email, texting and most every other enterprise mobility tool we run? If 8gb isnt good for your use case buy the bigger one...
I am reminded of something my grand father said to me when i was like 5 or 6 - "It is the job of the shop keeper to sell you what is on his shelf, it is your responsibility to know what you need and get that and nothing more or less."