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Users Find Renting a Movie On iTunes Frees Up Space On iPhone, iPad

An anonymous reader writes: Many, if not all, believe that 16GB storage on their iPhone and iPad is not sufficient. Apple insists that users with 16GB variant iDevice can always save files to the cloud. At any rate, several users have found an interesting way to free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad. The trick is to rent a movie from iTunes (on your mobile device) that is larger than the storage you have available. If you have 500MB free, for instance, you could try and rent Bridge of Spies, which is a 5.79GB download, according to an article on BetaNews. "When you click Rent, a loading symbol will appear but then you'll receive a message informing you that "there is not enough available storage" to download the film, and you'll be given the option of managing your storage in Settings. Tap the Settings button, and -- ta-da! -- you should see the amount of free storage you now have is much greater than before. Repeating the process will free up even more space."

11 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Memory by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

    Why do people buy 16Gb devices and then assume it will be good for anything beyond that 16Gb?

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    1. Re:Memory by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They don't. They assume that if the phone comes with 16Gb and has no expandability, that 16Gb is probably "good enough" because what manufacturer would come out with an explicitly crippled device that cannot be upgraded, not even for cold hard cash?

      There are a lot of 4Gb Android devices - with only 1.6Gb free, which is immediately reduced to half a gig as Play Store automatically updates all the software - but virtually all of them at least have an SD card slot. Some of them even let you use the SD card ;-) (That's another story... thankfully, reportedly, Android 6 has the ability to just fuse the SD card and internal storage together, though some manufacturers have disabled that functionality...)

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      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:Memory by mrclevesque · · Score: 3, Informative

      "They buy a 16GB device because that's what they want to buy"

      To quote you, "Bullshit"

      What's Behind Apple's Epic Memory Markup :

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

    3. Re:Memory by Geeky · · Score: 2

      Performance will take a hit as well. I put the fastest SD card I could find in my phone and ran a disk read/write speed test on internal storage and then on the SD card, and the internal came out 2-3x quicker

      --
      Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
  2. Re:Who rents this stuff? by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

    Another option if you want to keep it: Rent on Redbox, take it home, use the VUDU "DVD upgrader" app on your PC to purchase an online copy ($2 for same quality as original, $5 for an upgrade from DVD to HD)

    I haven't done it yet, largely because I'm the kind of disorganized idiot that Redbox makes money from (ie I'll rent something and then weeks later finally get around to returning it), but...

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. You can't just free the cache?^ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously? There is no way to do that without buying shit? Truly an innovative company.

    1. Re:You can't just free the cache?^ by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      Why would you want to manually free a cache when the system apparently manages it quite well (as evidenced by this whole story)? There's literally zero advantage to having free storage unless you have plans for it, and big downsides to blowing away, well, cache just because you like seeing a bigger number in the "free" column.

      There are lots of things my computer doesn't let me manually manage by default. When was the last time you manually set your hard drive RAM buffer size? I thought so.

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      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  4. Re:Who rents this stuff? by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 2

    I occasionally rent a movie from iTunes if I need some entertainment on a flight or long ride.

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    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  5. Easy come, Easy go by Dorianny · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is probably just deleting temporary cache files. The reclaimed storage will likely be gone in a few weeks usage

  6. Re:Who rents this stuff? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    ding ding ding! This is correct.

    I recently had my wife saying she couldn't take any pictures because there was no more free storage.

    So, go to the storage settings and just check what's using it all, right?

    Wrong. It doesn't even show you how much is actually being used. It tells you a number M that is in use, a number L that's free (in this case: 0MB), yet somehow advertised storage capacity N is much greater than the M it gives you - and you can't even make sense of it by thinking it must be the OS.

    So you go into manage storage thinking that at least you can clear some stuff up out of there, right?

    Wrong. Take the Photos app. In the manage storage settings, it will happily tell you that it's using, say, 500MB - even though there's 1GB of photos and oh hey look under "recently deleted" which apparently it ignores by design.. there's another 4GB of videos the nieces took and the wife wisely deleted-but-not-really.

    So you google that shit and the interwebs tell you that you should hook it up to a computer and manage it from there. And by that they mean, install iTunes. And by 'manage' the mean sync it first. And by 'manage' they mean "good luck. with that." because you still don't really get a clearer view of where in the fuck the your storage space went.

    In the end we factory reset the thing, re-linked the account to get settings, contacts, etc. back, and enjoyed all the freed up space.

    Short of Apple deciding that maybe offering this natively as an option or at least getting their math right, I'll certainly be happy to use the method described in the article in the future.

  7. Can verify this works by flopsquad · · Score: 4, Funny

    I rented $170 worth of From Justin to Kelly 4K and now my 64GB 6S has a total capacity of 96GB!

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    Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.