Will Apple Ever Kill the 16GB iPhone?

It’s that time folks. We’re getting close enough to the launch of a new iPhone for the rumor mill to kick into high gear. Around this time last year, many were praising the merits of sapphire for phone screens, only to have Apple omit that particular lifestyle feature.

Now with the 6S and 6S+ on the horizon, iOS fans are wondering if we’ll see improvements to storage.

This generation, Apple took a great step up for their mid-tier iPhone. Instead of spending $100 to bump up your phone to 32GB, you would receive a whopping 64GB. Unfortunately the base model iPhone remained at 16GB, which is a bit lean for a modern smartphone. Even 32GB can feel a bit cramped these days.

We’re expecting improvements to the camera, likely resulting in larger photos and video files. Phones are often a primary device for storing music, our apps are getting more demanding, and OS updates require a certain percentage of your storage to be unused and available. We ask a lot of our smartphones, and lacking the ability to upgrade the storage on an iPhone means users have to monitor their geebees very closely on that first tier iPhone.

Apple’s most recent announcements have focused on cloud services, music streaming, and previews of iOS 9 have shown improvement in freeing up space thanks to “App Thinning”. It would seem that as the iPhone is still selling like crazy, and we have to assume the bulk of those sales are 16GB phones, that there really isn’t a lot of market pressure to move the 6S up to 32GB for the base model.

There are some significant “value for money” questions to ask with this strategy. The LG G4 for instance, starts users off with 32GB, has the ability to increase storage through memory cards, and can often be found online unlocked for $150 less than an unlocked iPhone 6. Streaming music is certainly helpful, but most folks are on some kind of metered data plan through their carrier. Cloud storage is also subject to the same chilling effect from data caps, and important files can’t be accessed when you have poor service. Lastly, Apple’s iCloud pricing is less competitive than rivals Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.

So now the questions fly. Will Apple push the boundaries on the next iPhone? Will they play this coming round conservatively with a 16GB 6S (likely another $700 phone)?

What do you think Apple will do? Drop us a comment below!

 

2 Replies to “Will Apple Ever Kill the 16GB iPhone?”

  1. Ah I don’t know, speculation wise there is talk of 32gb of an iphone6s but thats just talk, I also wouldn’t be suprised if they just didn’t do nothing with the storage and kept it 16gb milk the model for as much as they can and then with the 7 to introduce a “NEW” 32gb storage in an iphone7 and a title to go with I can imagine is “the base iphone7 costs the same as the iphone6s but with double the storage!” [crowd goes wild]

    As far as the cloud storage goes it’s not a necessarily good thing nor bad. It’s good when you have strong reliable WiFi connection and you can sync and pull data off the clouds and even with the free storage you can grab like from box.com and one drive and google drive you can get a combined amount 80gb of free storage but then managing the files becomes somewhat of a task the you have google photos that upload all the photos you ever take for free if its set to the free setting. This is all good for certain types of demographics and places where constant good wifi or data connection from your carrier that gives you truly unlimited data unthrottled to upload a 2gb video of you recording life events. The bad this is that areas where people cant have strong unlimited 4g lte data or have crappier signal or the WiFi just isn’t fast enough to upload 1080p video that equals to the size of 2gb.

    Also; I don’t have a demographic that shows me how much of the total group of people buying the iphones are tech savvy or smartphone oriented in a sense to explore these storage clouds available unless advertised to them from apple or competing companies like Microsoft on the apple store to increase their cloud storage by going with them and so on. So yeah 16gb is paltry 32gb is kind of there I wouldn’t even say acceptable but its a better slandered then 16gb.

    1. Yup. Agree. For a flagship phone without expandable storage, 32GB is the bare minimum. Hopefully our networks improve soon to the point where cloud storage really can compete with local storage, but I think it’ll be a while before we can rely on that to a similar degree.

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