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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."
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, developers actually gave a fuck about the amount of space their software took because there was such limited space. They endeavored to introduce more features while using up less space and running faster. In fact, they'd regularly advertise on that fact because it was in a true sense an upgrade.
I mean, honestly, a 16GB device where 20% of the space is used up by the OS? Does it really need to be 3.3GB big?
Having said all that, yea, the lawsuit is stupid. They should return the device and demand a full refund or demand an ability to downgrade to an earlier version. And if that earlier version has bugs, demand they be fixed or again demand a full refund. And this holds true even if the device has been used a few years because the company should be responsible for fixing a defective product or refunding money for the purchase price.
Entitlement, and trying to profit from willful ignorance and opportunistic lawyers. All operating systems consume space. And upgrades usually take more space.
They contend the upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices
So, let them revert to the older version and gain back the space lost in the upgrade. Oh, they can't? C'est la vie.
"These misrepresentations and omissions cause these consumers to 'upgrade' their Devices from iOS 7 (or other operating systems) to iOS 8," it said. "Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a Device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space - a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate."
Did they think that iOS 7 took zero space? Tellingly, the chart they provide doesn't have any figures on how much space the previous OS took up. Guess they only decided to sue AFTER they noticed people complaining about how much space iOS8 took, and never bothered to check how much space was consumed by the OS before the upgrade, so they don't even know how much space the upgrade cost them.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Flash is already a bit weirdly sized because of extra bits for Flash Translation Layer to do block management. Maybe we just need flash parts that are big enough for a 1GB OS partition and don't even advertise the user visible partition. As a software engineer (on Android mostly) it would be pretty simple for the OS to manage a private partition because we already partition flash today.
The obvious would be to label devices as 7GB, 15GB, 31GB, etc. But unless all devices did this universally I don't think the public would accept that either. It would be better to secretly charge the consumer for the extra GB for the OS.
ps - I picked GB out of the air at random as a somewhat future-proof number for sub-64GB flash memories. Android uses significantly less than 1 GB, I assume iOS is approximately the same size.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What's so fucking hard about giving us more than 16Gb anyways? I got a 120 Gb SSD for under $100. What's so fucking hard about a MicroSD slot? That would put this argument to rest right away.
And strangely enough, even though Samsung used up to half of the memory on a 16GB Android phone, that's not an issue to these lawyers.
I've got a 128GB micro SD card (SanDisk) that I got for $100. It works fine in my phone (galaxy S4 google play edition) which only had a 16GB version available when I got it. Even if they'd had a 64GB version, I'd have had no way to expand the storage at all.
/data partition Android uses for app data storage is small by default, but by repartitioning the internal SD card I can let it take up almost the entire 16GB and use the external SD for the extra storage. Much better than having no option.
Now, it only works with media and documents, not with applications, and the
Not a sentence!
"You mean like how when Apple purposefully degrades the performance of older iOS devices when a new iOS version is out"
Example? So far (and I've run every iOS release) they do the opposite - they allow a much wider range of devices to upgrade than any other consumer electronics company. I have several Android devices, and new OS release support is spotty, because it's dependent on manufacturer and carrier QA, while Apple is the manufacturer, and got the carriers to allow Apple to push software straight to users without going through telco gatekeepers.
Apple does disable new features that run badly on older hardware, such as Siri only being available on newer phones, but that's the opposite of degrading - it's protecting users from degraded performance. So, as is typical with Apple, they'd rather deliver less functionality, with better performance, while Google goes the opposite direction - all sorts of functionality, but iffy performance. Both strategies are legitimate, and suit different kinds of users.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I suspect the original question was rhetorical, but there are two simple answers to why Apple doesn't include SD card slots in their phones:
I should also note that the GGP said he/she "gave up on Apple in 1988." That's absolutely their right, but I don't think it gives them much credibility (which should be based on detailed time spent with the different options) for a comparative analysis of the value of Apple products in 2015. If I said "Lunix is the suxor because I tried Yggdrasil and XFCE couldn't make my sound card work," I don't think you would give me much credibility in the present day.
"95% of all Slashdot
One of the wrinkles that possibly justifies a lawsuit for this is that Apple doesn't give regular users a way to downgrade the iOS version. So if your device had a "comfortable" amount of free space, an auto-update could put you into a "critically short of space" state with no way for most owners to revert the device to the old iOS. Thus forcing you to upgrade to a new device sooner than you expected. Relevant quote from TFA:
"These misrepresentations and omissions cause these consumers to 'upgrade' their Devices from iOS 7 (or other operating systems) to iOS 8," it said. "Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a Device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space - a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate."
All of my devices have microSD slots and have file systems that are accessible from my PC's file manager via USB. I won't buy one that doesn't meet these requirements.
By sheer coincidence, none of my mobile devices are sold by Apple.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
On an 8 GB iPhone I had to delete every piece of media and almost every app just to be able to download the ios updates.
Or you could have plugged into iTunes and upgraded, which would have downloaded and stored the IPSW firmware image on the computer and simply overwritten the existing OS image, not requiring the extra temp space.
Everyone bitched about not having over-the-air upgrading, right until they started bitching about how much storage it takes to do over-the-air upgrading.
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