Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit For Shrinking Storage Space In iOS 8

An anonymous reader notes that Apple is being sued over claims that iOS 8 uses too much storage space on the company's devices. "Ever wonder why there never is enough space on your iPhone or iPad? A lawsuit filed this week against Apple Inc. alleges that upgrades to the iOS 8 operating system are to blame, and that the company has misled customers about it. In the legal complaint filed in California, Miami residents Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara accuse Apple of "storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions" relating to Apple's 8 GB and 16GB iPhones, iPads and iPods. Orshan has two iPhone 5 and two iPads while Endara had purchased an iPhone 6. They contend the upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices."

Comments

MicroSD card?

[rossdee]

Why TF don't Apple have a slot for microSD card ike most smartphones these days.

Anyway I gave up on Apple in 1988

Re:MicroSD card?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had an SD card slot why would anyone pay an extra $200 for the large capacity phone?

Re:MicroSD card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially when you can get the same $200 worth storage for $10.

Re:MicroSD card?

[NoKaOi]

Than how about they add some memory dedicated to the OS? The stuff is not that expensive these days...

They do. It's part of that 16GB that they advertise. This is how pretty much all devices are advertised. Do laptops and desktops come with a separate disk for the OS? When they advertise the size of the hard drive do they subtract the size of the OS? How about other brands of phones or tablets?

These people are completely ignorant about what they are suing for, in which case they have no business suing, or are suing just to sue (or because their lawyers are hoping to turn it into a class action suit, settle, and rake in millions while a bunch of people get 50 cents each), in which case they still have no business suing.

Re:MicroSD card?

[bloodhawk]

Microsoft and others were forced to change how they advertise there devices because of complaints of how storage is used by the OS. While I agree this lawsuit is idiotic vendors really should be more forthcoming with information like storage, it isn't an insignificant amount that is taken on devices in this form factor and the average consumer doesn't know that he isn't really getting 8GB for photos and games, it wouldn't hurt there sales to be more open and honest, e.g. Microsoft now puts it directly on there site and even provides a table of how much storage is user available for each device. Would it really kill apple to do the same? currently the only thing apple adds is "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less."

Re:MicroSD card?

[King_TJ]

I was just going to leave this whole thing alone, but I've got to comment on this one.

There's nothing that great about adding MicroSD card slots to cellphones. Sure, "Everyone else does it (but Apple)." -- but that doesn't make it a good solution.
Whenever I've used Android devices, it's always added an extra layer of complexity, determining if an app or some data is stored on the internal or external storage. And while perhaps they've addressed it now, I also recall a lot of hassles with certain programs requiring things be stored using the internal storage only - as they didn't know how to work with the MicroSD storage.

I think most cellphones just did it that way to make the devices cheaper to build. "You want more storage space? Whatever.... buy a card for that...."

I'm not going to try to debate that Apple overcharges for the storage you get in a given iOS device. (Heck, I agree... they gouge for it. But with Apple products, you almost always pay a premium. Either way, it just means whatever you buy from them has that much better resale value down the road too.)

I just find that with a phone, I want the information in it to be "one" with the device itself. If I store address book entries, for example, it may as well just be in the phone's own internal storage, because it would really inconvenience me if it was on a removable card and I swapped the wrong card in the phone that didn't have that data on it. Never mind the propensity for some of these SD flash cards to go bad without warning and lose everything on them.

So no, I have no issue with the way Apple chose to do things with the iPhones and no card slots. They *do* have a USB cable to facilitate data xfer to/from other devices, so you're not completely unable to communicate with other hardware. It sounds to me like some people just tried to get off cheap, buying the minimum storage version of the phones available and bigger, more feature filled versions of iOS don't leave a lot of space for your apps on the "entry level" model. Nothing worthy of a lawsuit.

Re:MicroSD card?

[Drgnkght]

Fixed that for ya. I swear every time I have to use an Android device I get a migraine, it's like the UI is designed to drive sane people absolutely mad.

Fixed that for ya.

You say that like they can't both be true.

Re:MicroSD card?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The quality of removable storage media, especially SD cards (and derivative formats) varies drastically. Apple likes to ensure a consistent ecosystem so that all users have as consistent an experience as possible.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, there's no way it could have anything to do with the fact that flash memory prices have dropped significantly and the only way Apple can get away with charging its ridiculous premiums for slightly more memory is to prevent users from easily adding their own. (With micro SD prices now, I could find something costing less than $1/gigabyte, or if Apple supported USB OTG, I could even use a flash drive for about 30 cents/GB, but instead I have to pay about $2/GB if I want an iPad or whatever with more memory.)

And it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that those ridiculous premiums for lots of memory cause consumers to buy cheaper models rather than spending a couple hundred more dollars on an already way overpriced piece of hardware, and then are forced to upgrade to a new generation device in a couple years when they realize they don't have enough space.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- the huge profit motive here has nothing to do with it... It's just Apple being a good citizen and helping its users not up have to put up with some inferior piece of freakin' flash memory they might buy.

That MUST be it. Thanks for telling us.

Re:MicroSD card?

[the_B0fh]

You mean like how when Apple purposefully degrades the performance of older iOS devices when a new iOS version is out (that won't run on the older hardware)?

Help me understand what you just wrote?

1) Apple purposefully degrades the performance
2) of older iOS devices
3) when a new iOS version is out
4) (that won't run on the older hardware)?

Are you claiming Apple makes the older iOS that is currently installed on your phone, work slower, when a new version of iOS is released (but not installed on your phone)? If you can prove it, I'm sure the lawyers would love to speak to you.

If you cannot prove it, I'm sure the psychiatrists would love to speak to you.

Re:MicroSD card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple doesn't charge anyone for their software updates, either on iOS or (these days) OS X.

Well they should pay the customer for these updates as they degrade the idevice's performance, horribly. If Microsoft winxp can last ten years without major os upgrades we should be able to go without an ios version x+1 upgrade every 9 months or so?

Re:MicroSD card?

[The MAZZTer]

It's not the same. The internal storage is going to be MUCH faster than a PoS $10 SD card.

Re:Entitlement

[ngc5194]

Not so easy. What if Apple is adding wasted space to their OS distributions in order to coerce/trick customers into upgrading the older, lower capacity devices? Bear in mind that I don't know that they are, but I think it's certainly okay to pose the question if the larger space required by the newer operating systems is actually being used by new features or not. It may not be illegal for them to do so, but it's certainly morally questionable, and if they're doing this, I'd at least like to know.

From the same people

[hawkingradiation]

who brought us the "Google includes its own advertisements in search" complainers. They developed the product, so they get to say how it behaves or how much of their own product they include with their own product. Or should we conclude that these companies represent a significant presence in our life that we should all pay a mandatory fee to them and treat them as otherwise some sort of necessary corporations that simply have to exist? But then they would be like governments. Because that is the only way we will have a say in what they produce, except with our wallets.

Feeping creatursim

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

So they're upset that new features in an OS consumes more memory?

I felt like a million IT people cried out "DUH!" and then were silenced.

The premise of the suit is fatally flawed, period.

[Anonymous Coward]

The core reality in anything having to do with personal computers or similar devices
is that older hardware in the computer industry is always made obsolete by increasing
requirements for storage or performance ( or both ).

The idea that older hardware should have made allowances for software which did not
even exist when the hardware was spec'd and manufactured is simply absurd.

The only hope for this lawsuit is for the plaintiffs to somehow make sure the judge or jury
are technically illiterate. However I am pretty sure that Apple's counsel will make sure that
the case does not proceed when such conditions exist, because a non-tech savvy person
cannot possibly make a sound judgement of the merits of this suit.

Frankly, suits like this should result in punishment for those who file the suits. It's such obvious bullshit
and it wastes the court's time and also wastes the resources of the company which must defend itself.

Re:Entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

And if a computer is advertised as having a 250GB HDD and 16GB of RAM, that should be after factoring in what Windows 8 will need, am I right?

Re:Entitlement

[Dutchmaan]

"And Apple would do this so that they can reduce the number of people running their latest iOS?" No, Apple would do this to have a "legit" reason to tell people to upgrade to the newest "magical and amazing" device.

Re: Entitlement

[theshowmecanuck]

Then they wouldn't be able to sell iCloud as much. Same reason they don't let you easily transfer files back and forth to your PC via USB: so they can sell you something else that does. Same reason Finder sucks shit so bad, so you need to buy a file manager that works. And Apple at the very least gets a cut of everything sold from their store. Not only are Apple products overpriced, they nickle and dime you to death on everything else. The OS on its own is alright. It's all the other shit etc. that I just talked about that keeps me from buying one. PCs work fine for me. As does my Linux laptop.

Re:Entitlement

[aaarrrgggh]

I generally love everything Apple does and makes. That said, they botched iOS 8 from a user perspective. Everyone I know who had a small flash went and deleted all their apps and data first so they could download the update. They needed to tell people that they could do a tethered upgrade and use less space for the upgrade.

The way they did it reinforces the "upgrades are bad" mentality which is dangerous. Apple can do better.

Re:Entitlement

[Mister Transistor]

Once they fill their iDevice with all their U2 and other IToons garbage, they fill up the free space so that there is no longer room for the bloated "temporary" upgrade package files to download. Then, they are stuck unless they remove some of their media (and THAT ain't gonna happen)...

I have similar shit happen with my old Android phone, running CM7 as that is all that's available for it, and large package updates like WasteOfSpaceBook run out of memory. Then I get to go all techy with it and delete caches and program data until there's enough free space left to download the updates, one of my favorite activities, truly a joy untold, not helped by the fact that the idiots keep updating the apps weekly for some stupid reason(s). The main problem with Android is it's not media files eating up all the space, since they sit in a different memory area. It's a pre-reserved "system" memory area that is very small to start with and the newer apps push the limit of that "free" space to the edge. Feh.

Re: Entitlement

[Karlt1]

If only Apple provided another way to upgrade the OS that didn't involve the extra space. Maybe they could let you connect it to a computer and use iTunes.

Oh wait....