Apple.. What goes on there?

GrayFox208

I just noticed so forgive me if there's already a thread on this, but Apple dropped 32GB iPhone and kept 16GB which is useless... Did they say why??

gerrybbadd

$$$$

GrayFox208

Well money is how the world functions so can't blame them there.

boreder

GrayFox208 wrote: »

I just noticed so forgive me if there's already a thread on this, but Apple dropped 32GB iPhone and kept 16GB which is useless... Did they say why??

Its hardly useless. In fact, it's of far more use now than it's ever been, due to app-thinning, fast reliable mobile data connections, good music streaming apps, iCloud Photo Library, etc.

If 16GB were the only option, I'd agree with your point - but seen as the 64GB and 128GB capacities are available... people should buy those if they need more than 16GB of memory and / or don't want to use cloud services.

GrayFox208

boreder wrote: »

Its hardly useless. In fact, it's of far more use now than it's ever been, due to app-thinning, fast reliable mobile data connections, good music streaming apps, iCloud Photo Library, etc.

If 16GB were the only option, I'd agree with your point - but seen as the 64GB and 128GB capacities are available... people should buy those if they need more than 16GB of memory and / or don't want to use cloud services.

Yeah but you only get 10GB as well

MiskyBoyy

I'd be the last person to defend Apple.

I have a 16GB Nexus 5 (android) and never come near using all the memory. I have all my photos/files backed up to the cloud and usually do a full wipe every few months to keep the phone fresh & install a new ROM or something.

I guess 16GB wouldn't be enough for everyone but it certainly does me!

GrayFox208

Still if you're going to drop a memory option you'd surely pick the smallest? I mean with the iPhone 5 they didn't drop the 16GB and stay with 8 like.

salamanca22

As was mentioned before, it's all about the money.

Someone who wouldn't buy the 16gb but would the 32gb is now forced to go for the next expensive solution which is the 64gb costing them more, meanwhile apple can sell a 'low end' version for the people who would gawk at spending almost €900 on a phone that will be old news this time next year.

Honestly I think it is highway robbery, but that is just me.

GrayFox208

salamanca22 wrote: »

As was mentioned before, it's all about the money.

Someone who wouldn't buy the 16gb but would the 32gb is now forced to go for the next expensive solution which is the 64gb costing them more, meanwhile apple can sell a 'low end' version for the people who would gawk at spending almost €900 on a phone that will be old news this time next year.

Honestly I think it is highway robbery, but that is just me.

I agree it is a bit OTT. They must be using some serious memory if it costs 100 euro to put it in there but I don't know.

salamanca22

GrayFox208 wrote: »

I agree it is a bit OTT. They must be using some serious memory if it costs 100 euro to put it in there but I don't know.

It doesn't. It costs them about $8 for the 16gb phones nand and right now it costs about $30 for the 64gb chip according to a few researchers out there. So, it costs them $22 more and you €110 more. I have no idea if they use the same controller across the devices though, if they are using a different controller in the more expensive phone then it might put the price for them up another dollar or two.

It's also important to note that nand memory is decreasing in cost weekly and capacity is increasing daily. There is no need for the gouging from a lot of the phone providers out there, well, except for profits of course.

Another thing, the 16gb users will be pushed towards using icloud which I believe has a premium subscription? I'm not too sure on that though. I have not had an iphone since the 3gs.

GrayFox208

salamanca22 wrote: »

It doesn't. It costs them about $8 for the 16gb phones nand and right now it costs about $30 for the 64gb chip according to a few researchers out there. So, it costs them $22 more and you €110 more. I have no idea if they use the same controller across the devices though, if they are using a different controller in the more expensive phone then it might put the price for them up another dollar or two.

It's also important to note that nand memory is decreasing in cost weekly and capacity is increasing daily. There is no need for the gouging from a lot of the phone providers out there, well, except for profits of course.

Another thing, the 16gb users will be pushed towards using icloud which I believe has a premium subscription? I'm not too sure on that though. I have not had an iphone since the 3gs.

I don't think it's that dear but it's not cheap either.

Kensington

All about money.

16GB memory (of which about 10GB realistically usable) is too small for most people - so they either buy a premium iCloud sub for their photeys and videos or go the next phone up.

16GB jump to 32GB isn't enough to justify a €110 jump in price so just remove it from the line and make the €110 a jump to 64GB. Voila.

Either way it's gone a bit too OTT for my thinking when you can get a 64GB SD card for about €30 and 128GB cards are now coming in sub-€100.

Which is why my most recent phone purchase in recent weeks was my first non-Apple smartphone in about 5 years (4, 4s, 5, 5s).

bee06

I have an iPhone 6 16GB and have no issues with storage. Don't use iCloud and still have 3.5GB free.

If Apple had gone the other way and gotten rid of the 16GB then there'd be people complaining that they got rid of the cheapest option to force people to spend more. Can't please everyone.

Creamy Goodness

I'd like to lend a different story. One I heard from an apple engineer (not retail staff) one that actually works in Cupertino.

Money did come into it don't get me wrong but he mentioned that Apple weren't happy with the quality of the 32gb flash chips that they got their hands on and many were bought up by other manufacturers to stick in other devices such as android phones, set top boxes and etc. Apple saw the opportunity to bring the 64gb option down to the same price the 32gb was to rectify and also to up sell.

The people who always got 32gb got a spec bump for free and Apple upselled some people from the 16gb to 64gb.

salamanca22

bee06 wrote: »

I have an iPhone 6 16GB and have no issues with storage. Don't use iCloud and still have 3.5GB free.

If Apple had gone the other way and gotten rid of the 16GB then there'd be people complaining that they got rid of the cheapest option to force people to spend more. Can't please everyone.

The main complaint is they got rid of 32gb instead of making it the baseline at the base price. Nand memory has steadily lowered in price yet they are charging the same and sometimes more for the same.

They really should have made it 32gb at the 16gb price. It would have been a much easier pill to swallow but I guess they wouldn't sell as many iCloud subs then.

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

I'd like to lend a different story. One I heard from an apple engineer (not retail staff) one that actually works in Cupertino.

Money did come into it don't get me wrong but he mentioned that Apple weren't happy with the quality of the 32gb flash chips that they got their hands on and many were bought up by other manufacturers to stick in other devices such as android phones, set top boxes and etc. Apple saw the opportunity to bring the 64gb option down to the same price the 32gb was to rectify and also to up sell.

The people who always got 32gb got a spec bump for free and Apple upselled some people from the 16gb to 64gb.

Don't get me wrong, I am in no way an expert in apples dealings but I am an electronic engineer and I do work with different types of memory so I understand the tech and some of the economy. The decision to scrap the 32gb model would have came at a very early stage of development, perhaps even before the last generation on iPhone came out so there is plenty of time to find a good chip to use. Apple, the last I read (It was a while ago, could be changed) use a few companies for their nand chips. Hynix and samsung are two that I recall so they would have had options.

They are a business, and it is mostly about money. They wouldn't be selling a 900 euro phone with 200 euro worth of components in it if they weren't out to make money :P

arch_stanton

It's all about balancing profits over the whole range of phones, demand and what the customer is willing to pay.

The 16GB is limited these days but it works for many people, especially those who use their phones as a whatsapp, candy crush and facebook machine (plus phone calls). There are many of these users who can get by just fine with 16GB.

By putting the next model up at 64GB it gives a strong incentive for the more active user to go for that one. Having "for only €100 extra you get 4 times the memory" looks like a better deal. It's like when you go to the cinema, the smallest popcorn is tiny but for €1 extra you get a bucket you could live in, so it's easy to upsell you on the "bargain". The extra popcorn costs the cinema very little, the extra euro you pay is almost pure profit. Same with RAM for the iphones. I'm sure a lot of the component pricing you see on the blogs is nonsense but nobody could argue that RAM isn't cheap for apple so most of the extra you pay is again profit.

In a way the 64GB users are subsidising the 16GB users. In a simplified view, Apple decides that they want X profit margin on the iPhone but it's not the same across all models. It's lowest on the 16GB versions, then higher on the 64 and higher again on the 128. If they dropped the price of the higher models to a more realistic RAM price, to maintain their X average margin they would increase the cost of the 16GB version.

Eugene Norman

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

I'd like to lend a different story. One I heard from an apple engineer (not retail staff) one that actually works in Cupertino.

Money did come into it don't get me wrong but he mentioned that Apple weren't happy with the quality of the 32gb flash chips that they got their hands on and many were bought up by other manufacturers to stick in other devices such as android phones, set top boxes and etc. Apple saw the opportunity to bring the 64gb option down to the same price the 32gb was to rectify and also to up sell.

The people who always got 32gb got a spec bump for free and Apple upselled some people from the 16gb to 64gb.

Yes it worked out well for me. I got the mid range option with more memory.

I'd like to see 32, 128, 256 though.

Eire Go Brach

32GB is the sweet spot. It would eat into the 64 GB sales. Less profit basically. They could easily do it. But would have less turnover.

Type 17

32GB would have eaten into sales of 64GB - case in point, my wife uses her iPhone for surfing, messaging and news, but isn't a big music or photography fan, so 16GB has always been enough, but this time around, for the 6s, we were going to get her a 32GB just to keep it re-saleable.
In the absence of the 32GB, we weren't going to buy a 16GB, as it would not be easy to sell later on, so she is now using a 64GB, which has about 58GB free at present...

dodzy

Eire Go Brach wrote: »

32GB is the sweet spot. It would eat into the 64 GB sales. Less profit basically. They could easily do it. But would have less turnover.

+1. Nailed it.

Oafley Jones

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

I'd like to lend a different story. One I heard from an apple engineer (not retail staff) one that actually works in Cupertino.

Money did come into it don't get me wrong but he mentioned that Apple weren't happy with the quality of the 32gb flash chips that they got their hands on and many were bought up by other manufacturers to stick in other devices such as android phones, set top boxes and etc. Apple saw the opportunity to bring the 64gb option down to the same price the 32gb was to rectify and also to up sell.

The people who always got 32gb got a spec bump for free and Apple upselled some people from the 16gb to 64gb.

Never listen to that person again. They're telling you porkies.

FourFourRED

salamanca22 wrote: »

Someone who wouldn't buy the 16gb but would the 32gb is now forced to go for the next expensive solution which is the 64gb costing them more.

The 32GB was replaced with 64GB. Not for more money, same difference in price between 16GB & 32GB used to be. So you're getting a better deal for getting the middle option.

The big reason is that if 32GB was the baseline alongside 64GB & 128GB, the cheapest model would sell far too much & they wouldn't make as much money money from the middle tier iPhone.

laraghrider

There is also the movement towards streaming and app thinning which a lot of people are going towards. More and more people are finding they don't need the 64gb or 128gb models due to changing habits. In my phone I have 16gb built in 1(3 or so usable) and a 64gb SD card. All my photos back up to google photos so I don't need a lot of local storage for pics and music wise I mostly stream radio or spotify. So essentially all the space is wasted on me. If you take music into it all my music is backed up to my onedrive account and I can use groove player to stream my music direct from there so I don't even have much reason to store music locally given my unlimited data plan.

So all in all you will see devices offering less memory as we move more into a full streaming model and your large 64 or 128gb models will have a lot of redundant memory in them.

MillField

boreder wrote: »

Its hardly useless. In fact, it's of far more use now than it's ever been, due to app-thinning, fast reliable mobile data connections, good music streaming apps, iCloud Photo Library, etc.

If 16GB were the only option, I'd agree with your point - but seen as the 64GB and 128GB capacities are available... people should buy those if they need more than 16GB of memory and / or don't want to use cloud services.

I don't agree. If you buy an iPhone 6s, capable of live photos and 4k video, you will fill up 16 GB in no time regardless of cloud services and app thinning. People who can just about afford an iPhone certainly won't be jumping at the chance to spend another 100 euro on some extra storage.

32GB base model should be a no brainer at this stage. Unfortunately margins on profits come first with these things. Still, I'm sure the iPhone 7 won't come with a 16GB base..

Creamy Goodness

a smart phone is a luxury item, if you can "just about afford" one, you shouldn't be buying one.

Sad Professor

For those us savvy enough to know that 16GB is insufficient, having it as the base model isn't a huge problem as we know to get to 64GB instead. While this may amount to an effective price increase for those of us who would have been perfectly happy with 32GB, having to pay an extra 100 for 4 times the storage on an already very expensive device isn't the end of the world. We might moan about it but it's unlikely to be enough to make us switch or hold off upgrading, resulting in a nice bit of upselling on Apple's part.

However, for people new to iPhones or coming from cheaper Android devices, having 16GB as the base model is a restriction which may seriously impact the user experience of the device and turn them off iPhones. Apple's measly 5GB of free iCloud storage isn't going to help much with this. While paying 12 euro a year for 50GB seems like a no-brainer to me and many others, a lot of smartphone users, especially coming from Android, really don't believe in paying for software or services after getting them free from Google for so long. So in the long run I'd worry that Apple have shot themselves in the foot.

MillField

Sad Professor wrote: »

However, for people new to iPhones or coming from cheaper Android devices, having 16GB as the base model is a restriction which may seriously impact the user experience of the device and turn them off iPhones. Apple's measly 5GB of free iCloud storage isn't going to help much with this. While paying 12 euro a year for 50GB seems like a no-brainer to me and many others, a lot of smartphone users, especially coming from Android, really don't believe in paying for software or services after getting them free from Google for so long. So in the long run I'd worry that Apple have shot themselves in the foot.

Totally agree. I'm sure this is the last we'll see of a flagship iPhone coming with 16GB for storage, but it's still a shame nonetheless.

MillField

Good post about this: https://david-smith.org/blog/2015/09/10/16gb-is-a-bad-user-experience/