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Upgrades Cellphones Iphone

Why the iPhone 6 Has the Same Base Memory As the iPhone 5 264

Posted by timothy from the enough-is-enough-for-anybody dept.
Lucas123 writes When the iPhone 5 was launched two years ago, the base $199 (with wireless plan) model came with 16GB of flash memory. Fast forward to this week when the iPhone 6 was launched with the same capacity. Now consider that the cost of 16GB of NAND flash has dropped by more than 13% over the past two years. So why would Apple increase capacity on its $299 model iPhone 6 to 64GB (eliminating the 32GB model), but but keep the 16GB in the $199 model? The answer may lie in the fact that the 16GB iPhone is, and has been, by far the best selling model. IHS analyst Fang Zhang believes Apple is using that to push users to its iCloud storage service. Others believe restricting storage capacity allows Apple to afford the new features, like NFC and biometrics.
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Why the iPhone 6 Has the Same Base Memory As the iPhone 5 More

Why the iPhone 6 Has the Same Base Memory As the iPhone 5

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  • Memory doesn't cost that much. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Saturday September 20, 2014 @09:30AM (#47953537)

    Its only to drive people to use cloud services and buy the expensive model for more capacity. Apple would be stupid to satisfy its users.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You are missing the point. All of my Android phones include the ability to add a MicroSD card. I don't care how much memory is on the phone, my data (pictures etc) doesn't reside there. Apple's continued refusal to add a MicroSD slot is just more of their way of ripping off their customers.

      • All of my Android phones include the ability to add a MicroSD card.

        Great! Sounds like you are a satisfied customer of Android phones.

        I don't care how much memory is on the phone, my data (pictures etc) doesn't reside there

        Fair enough. I don't personally care to store my photos etc on an SD card but to each their own. I'd rather sync my stuff wirelessly to a remote drive and not worry about storing my stuff on a modern day floppy disk. If you want to go old school that's fine but don't presume the rest of us want to follow your lead.

        Apple's continued refusal to add a MicroSD slot is just more of their way of ripping off their customers.

        So because Apple provides an extremely popular product but doesn't provide the exact product you want they are "ripping people

      • You are missing the point. All of my Android phones include the ability to add a MicroSD card. I don't care how much memory is on the phone, my data (pictures etc) doesn't reside there. Apple's continued refusal to add a MicroSD slot is just more of their way of ripping off their customers.

        I don't need to put an SD card in my iPhone - I have the proper cable and 3tb of HDD capacity. The 32gig of memory on my phone is just short term storage for anything I want to keep.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by u38cg ( 607297 )
      An alternative explanation, because Apple is no doubt exploiting price drops as they happen, is that they've simply realised many users probably don't come close to touching that amount of storage anyway. My wife uses her 5S nonstop and only has about 10GB used.

    • I had this discussion with a coworker the other day. He and his wife have three children, which - as new parents, causes them to generate photos at approximately the firing rate of an MG42 installed inside a pillbox at Normandy.

      So, Apple wants $20/month for their 1 TB iCloud plan.
      DropBox wants $99/year for the same 1 TB.

      Flickr will cheerfully store 1TB FOR FREE.

      I told him this yesterday during a coffee chat - *blink* ... *blink* .. "I'm going to talk to (wifesname) about Flickr tonight."

      Even though I mysel

    • Its just marketing. If the base model was 32gb not many would shell out the extra 100$ for 64 model. But 16 vs 64 - even i am considering it...

  • The answer may lie in the fact that the 16GB iPhone is, and has been, by far the best selling model.

    Therein lies the answer. It's always about the money. Period.

    • Re:Yes and yes... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by laird ( 2705 ) <lairdp@gm a i l.com> on Saturday September 20, 2014 @09:44AM (#47953607) Journal

      Best selling means that most actual consumers think that 16 GB is enough. That means that while _you_ want more storage in a smartphone, most people don't. That doesn't make them wrong. :-)

      • Best selling means that most actual consumers think that 16 GB is enough. That means that while _you_ want more storage in a smartphone, most people don't. That doesn't make them wrong. :-)

        Up to now, you had to pay a lot of money to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB. Now you get 64GB for the same money. I'd think the percentage of 64GB purchasers will go up.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by snsh ( 968808 )

        It's a value decision. Consumers didn't want to pay a $100 premium for the additional 16GB.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by h2oliu ( 38090 )

      So true. I wonder what the ratio business/consumer is. For a business user who needs internet, mail, phone, and maybe a few additional apps, 16 will be completely appropriate. I think this is part of the reason for the jump to 64. You either need very little additional space, or you need significantly more.

    • Or that if you signed up for a phone plan, they gave you the base 16-gig model, and upgrading was really expensive.

  • That doesn't sound right. Can anybody confirm?

  • So you've got a part that costs X, and after two years the cost is reduced by 13%, meaning that the part now costs .87 times X. You can continue to use this part, offering either a 13% reduction in the portion of your overall price that is contributed by this part, or you can maintain overall price and reap slightly more profit. You can also decide to use two of this part to increase device capacity, and now your cost is 1.74 times the original X. You can now reduce your profits by keeping your overall p

  • It is obviously because Apple has engineered iOS so well that it only requires a fraction of the memory that Android does.

    And, iOS8 has such wonderful memory technologies that Apple developed that even new apps only need a small fraction of the memory that they would need in Android and iOS7. So, there was absolutely no need to put extra memory that will never be used.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by laird ( 2705 )

      If most users are buying 16 GB phones and are happy with that, why would Apple add more storage to the base model? Instead they can take the dollar or two saved and use that to pay for the improved camera, glass, etc., which people might care about more.

      • Why add more? To sell more stuff on iTunes, that's why.

        We have a pair of 16GB iPads. They are chock full and have been for awhile.

        Some apps are approaching 2GB each now (Real Racing and Infinity Toy Box are two examples).

        We could fill 64GB without any trouble. It would be nice to be able to download more than two movies for offline use as well.

        If it were priced reasonable, I'd be happy to pay a bit more for storage. But when a 256GB SSD is approaching $100, it is insulting to charge $100 for 48GB of sto

    • and PBA will not be able to run the SAM games due to low ram they need up to about 128-256 just to hold the roms in ram and then you have game engine + os on top of that.

    • Indeed. Music files and Video files take sooooo much less space on iOS !

    • Actually iOS 8 uses more storage than iOS 7.

      I prefer storage as the term. You store data on the 16 GB and the memory is the run time ram.
      However I think the cost is the big difference. Apple lies their price points. The $699 price has been the same for how many revisions? They probably just can't get 32gb under that number.

      • Lies, likes oops. Damn android swipe autocorrect.

        Typed from my nexus 7.

    • don't need 16Megs. People on slashdot criticize apple for forcing you to buy features you don't need. Now you critize apple for making the base model something not geek worthy. they are offering what their customers need. Chances are the number of songs or photos you want to keep stored on your iphone at any time isn't geoing with time. and that's the majority of the space usage on most people's phones. With icloud and beats streaming that need is going to dramatically shrink as well. The only thing

    • Not sure if a magnificent troll, or a magnificent Apple shill...

  • Usual strategy is to sell at high margins to a small percentage of your customers. In Apple's case they are doing it the opposite way. I think ive read nvidia and amd do the same with graphics cards as well where the performance models are the lower margin sku.

  • It turns out MOST people use very few apps.
    The need for more then 16GB is a very small part of the market.
    Why add more flash that won't be used?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gnupun ( 752725 )
      Then add a microSD slot with support for 64GB memory slot. On a grandma/grandpa or luddite would be okay with only 16GB.
      • I wish they'd do that, especially on iPads. I have a 64GB iPhone that has less than 20GB in use, mostly music and navigation software for Europe and the US. But I usually stick a bunch of movies on my iPad when I travel, for personal in flight entertainment, and they fill up the available space quite fast. Having an SD card for that would be great.

      • The downside of SD cards (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Saturday September 20, 2014 @12:33PM (#47954481)

        Then add a microSD slot with support for 64GB memory slot.

        You seem to think that a microSD card is an unambiguously positive feature. It is not. You seem to understand the upside but let me lay out the downsides:

        1) It adds bulk to the phone for a feature that most customers do not care about and will not use
        2) It adds to the cost of the product for design, manufacturing, warranty, and support (again for a feature few will actually use)
        3) It reduces the reliability of the device by a small but statistically significant amount. When you are selling these in the millions that adds up to substantial expense.
        4) Adding the microSD card comes at the expense of other features that could occupy that space such as additional battery capacity.
        5) It is a vector for dust and debris to enter the phone (see point 3 above)
        6) It requires supporting third party hardware that may have compatibility issues
        7) SD cards come in a variety of speeds and people will inevitably buy SD cards that are not fast, incompatible or have other performance issues
        8) It complicates the software on the device and almost certainly will result in bugs.
        9) The functionality can be replicated in other ways that may (and in fact are) preferable to other people such as wirelessly syncing data to other devices.
        10) SD cards basically are modern day floppy disks. Do we *really* need to go back to those?

        I can keep going. If you want a microSD card on your phone because that is critical to you then there are plenty of excellent options available to you, particularly among Android phones. Pick one and stop trying to tell everyone that they are stupid because they don't care to do things just like you would.

  • Easy (Score:3)

    by Exitar ( 809068 ) on Saturday September 20, 2014 @09:54AM (#47953677)

    An expanded memory will be the new wonderful feature of the iPhone 7 that all the world was expecting.

    • An expanded memory will be the new wonderful feature of the iPhone 7 that all the world was expecting.

      The iphone was few bragging points and one of them is its slimness is one of them. look at the ugly badly designed protruding camera on the me too iphone to protect the use of this stupid advantage(sic). It uis the same reason they don't have removable batteries.

  • Personally I have little use for a large amount of storage. My music collection is small, I don't care to watch videos on my phone and I prefer not to keep my entire picture library on it. As long as the OS doesn't take up a unreasonable amount of space 16gb works just fine for me.

    • I prefer not to keep my entire picture library on it.

      With its tiny resolution cameras you don't need a lot of storage. It is only 8MP the selfie cam is an astonishingly small 1.2. I agree though mobile devices should advise space free not total amount. In this case iOS 8 takes up 5GB of that space so should advertise itself as a 11GB phone

  • companies like Apple buy everything in bulk. They probably thought that buying up as many 16GB modules as possible would cover them over the production lifecycle of the 5, which it has, but now they've got crates of the 16GB chips they have to use somewhere: so how about the budget next generation phones? Once the 16GB models are gone, you won't see 16GB iphone 7s.

    • I've made a similar point earlier. If they're out to sell iCloud, they're doing a bad job of it. You can't store apps on the cloud, and not a lot of apps store app specific data to make the iCloud free tier feel constrained.

    • By apps on the cloud, I mean, you can't have apps that your phone can use in the cloud. Deleting and shuffling apps around just because you're on the 16 gig tier phone isn't great a UX either. I think they'd rather just throw in more storage if people had that problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

        agreed, local user storage isn't the priority for budget phones, if they're using the same processors then that proves the point. You would be able to use exactly the same apps on the 16GB version as you could on the 64GB version; the difference is how much space is left for your Kanye West back catalogue.

          (how much of a typical iphone app is actually userland content rather than executable code?)

        • For most non games? A few megs. For things like, specialized medical scanners or tools to interface with random heavy equipment? Probably way more.

          It's games really that fill my iPhone. Well, games and podcasts. :)

  • "What can we include to meet a specific price point?" In this case, $200.
    If that means Feature A (total GB) has to suffer to include Feature B (NFC)....so be it.

    • http://www.computerworld.com/a... [computerworld.com]
      Bumping from 16-GB to 64-GB costs approximately $25 in parts, or less considering Apples bulk purchasing power.. But Apple of course charges a $100 premium.

      • A 5 cent part in a car ends up costing $5, but you're OK with it being a 100x the part price.

        $25 in parts ending up costing $100, and you bitch about a 4X increase.

        Good thing you're not in business, or you'd rapidly go out of business.

  • To upgrade my phone to IOS 8 I had to free some space. This basically involved deleted some Apps that I never use that were taking a great deal of space. I don't buy apple movies because they can be only played on apple devices, so the majority of data is music, most of which is stored on the cloud, and photos. I know people have almost no music on their devices, but stream everything. To be honest, streaming has meant that many people do not have to deal with the hassle of local storage. Though we can ge
  • Maybe it's just me, but when I hear a term like base memory, what comes to mind is how much ram the device actually has for runtime applications to use, not flash ram,which I would equate more to permanent or offline storage.

  • Why worry? (Score:5, Funny)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Saturday September 20, 2014 @10:14AM (#47953803)

    Apple users are such whiners. If 16GB is not enough, just insert a TF card.

  • Memory? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Torp ( 199297 ) on Saturday September 20, 2014 @10:17AM (#47953815)

    The iPhone 6 comes with 1 Gb of memory. And has options for 16, 64 and 128 Gb of storage.
    Why does this even get published?

    • The iPhone 6 comes with 1 Gb of memory. And has options for 16, 64 and 128 Gb of storage.
      Why does this even get published?

      Because 16GB it is considered useless with todays ever growing Application, Photo and Video sizes...and ironically OS Sizes. Even. National newspapers are discussing it http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci... [dailymail.co.uk]

      • Yes, and would increasing it 13 percent really make a difference? I would say at one point, when you have such a small amount it does not really matter if it is doubled it is still too small for your entire data storage needs, so better to use than money somewhere else.

      • Because 16GB it is considered useless with todays ever growing Application, Photo and Video sizes...and ironically OS Sizes.

        Maybe among the slashdot crowd but that's not even remotely true among the General Public. I'm pretty sure Apple and other device makers have a pretty accurate idea how much space actually gets used on most devices. Furthermore they have options available for those who actually do need more storage space.

        National newspapers are discussing it

        They also spend a lot of time discussing vital matters such as the latest escapades of the Kardashian family. Do you have a point?

  • People who run out of memory are more likely to upgrade when the next iPhone comes out.

  • I'm waiting for the Slashdot story about how obviously no one will ever need more than 640k of memory ever.

    I do want to rant out about iPhone 6 memory though. 1GB is ridiculously low. They claim it was a choice to reduce battery use.
    Using the gopro with 240 fps on the gopro app on a Galaxy S4 is a nightmare and I envision that it will be the same on the iPhone. Not quite sure how they plan on getting good performance even for in-phone features.

  • The bottom line isn't about what is cheaper and what can be put in - it's the users.

    When I ordered my wife's new phone, I asked how much memory she wanted. She didn't know - said her current one is 64, so at least 64. I said hold on, wait:

    Went home, checked her phone, said, "You realize with all the apps, photos, videos, etc..you've only breached 5gigs on your phone, right?"

    Many users simply *do not need the capacity*. Just because many of us are geeks, install a ton of stuff, and store a lot of media, does

  • maybe 16Gb is enough for the real current use cases for the average iphone user?

    Apple has been pretty good in identifying the users needs and limiting what they put in the phones.

    Which was the case for the iphone 1, where everybody wondered about UMTS. As a matter of fact, iphones are not meant to be "general puprose computers", and they suck ehen used as such. They are perfectly balanced media players.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drolli ( 522659 )

      Side remark: my mobile storage in my andoid devices is 16Gb since quite some time (beginning of 2011), although i use sd card to expand it (mainly backup).

  • https://www.samsung.com/global... [samsung.com]

    SD card for storage up to 128 GB, 4K video, etc.

    When you buy an iPhone 6 you're reaching backwards.

  • It will cost Apple 5 dollars or less on a phone that will cost over 500 dollars (without a contract) in the store to upgrade it to 32G. It's not a matter of physical space in the phone because they have 64G and 128G models as well. This is purely so they will sell more 64G phones to people that think 16G isn't enough.

    • If 10 million people choose the 16G phone and the incremental cost is $5/phone to take it to 64GB (which I don't believe but won't debate), that's $50M that Apple didn't need to spend to satisfy those customers.

      But it does make it all the more sweet to overcharge those that want 64GB for the difference.

  • O yes, I forgot it's Apple. They can charge $100 for each 16gb of additional storage. Silly Andriod users like myself just go buy a 64GB mirco sd card for $39.

  • Storage not Memory (Score:3)

    by MrEdofCourse ( 2670081 ) on Saturday September 20, 2014 @05:32PM (#47955903) Homepage

    The title says Memory, but they're talking about Storage.

    The answer is that a lot of people use less than 16GB of storage. The more interesting question is why the 32GB doesn't exist.

    I think it's because people either don't use much storage at all, like my mom or girlfriend who just use the iPhone for email, Safari, Twitter, Words with Friends, Facebook, and streaming music. For them, 16GB is more than enough.

    Once you start collecting music, photos, videos and such, 32GB is not nearly enough, so 64GB kicks in. While 32GB would be enough for those in between casual users and media collectors... say those that just take a lot of pictures, but nothing else, the numbers of these people are too small to support a 32GB offering in the line up and Apple is better off bumping these people up to 64GB.

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