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

Posted by timothy on 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.

3 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Because of Apple engineering by m00sh · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:lockin by gnupun · · Score: 4, Informative

    In an age where 16 GB is available as RAM on many desktops and laptops, it's stupid to sell/buy a computer with only 16 GB persistent storage.

    The iPhone is just an underpowered palm computer with touch interface instead of keyboard/mouse of a laptop. Is the portability premium so high, or the case so shiny, that we have to pay 2 times the cost of a powerful laptop while getting computing power/memory of a 5 year old laptop?

    BTW, please stop calling flash as "Memory" (in the title) because memory is often confused with RAM.

  3. Re:It costs power by RandomUsername99 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Local music can easily blow through that limit. Mine does. Streaming stuff is fine in urban areas, but if you travel outside of urban areas with little phone service regularly, and you don't want to carry another device, it's pretty irritating to be significantly limited in the amount to music you can carry.