16GB Is a Bad User Experience
david-smith.org
david-smith.org
This, a thousand times over. Was at the beach last week, there was a seal sunbathing on a rock 50m from shore... Around me I could hear people complaining they couldn't see it properly - because all weren't looking at it, rather at the crappy digital zoom on their phones.
I just looked at the fucking thing, these eye things work pretty well. I'd rather be present and use my meat-based memory than have a "memory" on my phone of an event I viewed through a glass, darkly.
Also, 16gb 5s here, space I have to think about quarterly, if that.
I'm going to blow your mind: you are actually allowed to do both.
Allowed, yes. Capable, not likely. Multitasking is overrated and actually counterproductive when writing to the meat-store inside your skull.
I want full recording of everything I see and hear at qualities high enough that I can go back and look at things I missed the first time. I thought Google Glass was the start of that, but it looks like it's going to be a few more years.
If the recording is completely passive, as randallsquared was saying, why not?
If you think this is good, like some sort of pressure to make the public more accountable for what they say... I would warn that instead of an ethical wonderland you may find yourself in a panopticon pressure cooker with the status quo in power.
In any case, as the tech to record becomes ever smaller and less obtrusive, there will ultimately be no way to know whether you are being recorded digitally. Therefore society and people's reactions will adjust.
I think in the end it will become quite taboo to operate a recording device with your friends all the time. Maybe it will become okay to turn it on during a jog through the city or a trip to the fair, but having your recording device turned on while enjoying a glass of wine with me on my back porch will be a no-no. Having it own while at the gym? No. Client meeting or anything work related which could contain company "secrets"? No. Maybe I'm wrong and there will be a cultural shift in which we all just submit ourselves to this sort of social survalience, but I find it hard to imagine it happening in any sphere more interesting than a family trip to the Apple Store.
There is no way that a first date and the potential trip back to my place has any room for a recording, it's just not a psychological and social fit.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting debate. Reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror. Check that out for sure, it basically illustrates what you are saying. I found the segment in which before boarding an airplane passengers were required to allow the security to review their memory quite disturbing. Extrapolate that invasion of privacy in every other direction. Having whatever cloud or personal drive you record to be potentially hackable or open for evidence in the courts... It's just some dystopian death of privacy territory that I can't ever seeing the public embracing. Then again, maybe they will and if they do I'll be moving myself to whatever state our country is willing to stand up for privacy and ban such devices.
The basis of my position is the historical record that the most important ideas and movements towards advancements in human rights have often started out as illegal, unpopular and challenges to the status quo. The idea that we can stop crime by recording everything is an illusion and will only serve to suppress advancements which defy the current rule of law.
I've seen Black Mirror, and liked it for the most part. I don't remember that particular scene, though. Maybe it's time for a rewatch. :)
Neal Stephenson, writing in 1999:
I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.
And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer.
I'd rather have a digital memory, as poor as it may be, than rely on my meat-based memory which is terrible at the best of times, and many important events I lose quickly, without a way to refresh them periodically—like a photograph. So awesome for you that your memory is great, but that's not universal.
First, a bunch is reserved for the OS and similar. The phone might only start out with 12 GB for the user.
Second, a bunch just "disappears". Attach a phone to iTunes and it claims perhaps 2 GB free. But view the free space within the phone itself and it might only show 500 MB free. Huge discrepancies are inevitable, and it doesn't seem possible to find out how to resolve them.
Third, a large chunk is often taken by Apple with pending iOS updates pushed to the phone. But then the phone refuses to actually do the update, claiming there's not enough free storage.
It's a clusterfuck. And there's very little discussion or outrage about it. Apple should be embarrassed, but they don't give a shit.
Then being "savvy", I was copying and deleting photos directly through explorer. Well, this leads to ghost space, which is resolved by setting the clock back to reveal deleted but unpurged photos in the recycle bin [0]. Wack.
Then found Dropbox Carousel. Victory of the cloud, no more local storage needs. Except still kept running out of space. Turns out Carousel uses as much as it can as cache (in my case 4GB). WTF!
So yes, I'd wholeheartedly agree that 16GB is a bad user experience. Users are basically in constant competition with Apple and other apps for space, and at 16GB the user is constantly losing.
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[0] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6560594?start=45&tstart...
Storage size as sole model differentiation is sooo 2001. At this point it genuinely makes Apple look out of touch in a market where every other flagship quality model doesn't bother with it and includes an SD slot, partly I suspect because it's just saner from a production and inventory standpoint even besides the consumer benefits.
With an SD card slot, users can just buy the baseline model and get an SD card from another vendor. That money does not go to the manufacturer.
So manufacturers have an obvious incentive to produce phones without an SD card slot.
Moreover, there is little incentive to produce phones with an SD card slot. A long-time iPhone user isn't going to switch to a non-iPhone just because of the lack of an SD card slot.
It's also an extra step in manufacturing of course.
1. Flagship models don't all include an SD slot. Galaxy S6, Moto X, Nexus 6 for example. It's clearly a common decision.
2. I doubt that even if they iPhone did include such a slot the problem would be solved. Removable storage is complicated.
That's a really good point! They tote the device as a replacement, but clearly cripple it in a way that a dedicated device would not be.
The masses might need the dumb, sealed up version, but the hackers are the ones who'll push the envelope and extend the platform. It's like an extended R&D division for little additional cost.
I guess the problem is that the hackers will come up with cool hardware add-ons and apps, and the masses will get confused and jealous.
It's about market segmentation.
It's not cost. 32gb memory units in bulk are like $1 maybe. Apple charges an extra $100 because they are using that easy-to-understand difference to segment the market and collect an extra $100 profit from those that can afford that price point.
The author states that this (presumably) intentional choice undermines the Apple brand that includes quality and uncompromisingly excellent user experience.
I use Spotify for music, and have an offline playlist with about 2GB songs. Photos and movies are synced to the cloud, and files older than 1 month are deleted from the device. I have 3.2GB available.
So while your points may be valid for some, I can manage fine with 16GB. And it's not like I'm thinking about it, and change my habits to have the 16GB phone.
If you want to take a lot of video and photos with your phone, buy one with a lot of storage. If you aren't in the habit of photographing your lunch before you eat it, you can get by with a lot less.
It baffles me that people want one tool for all jobs.
Twitter might not even know they have a problem! iOS Dev team members are constantly installing new builds of the app.
It's factual evidence that Apple does indeed play games and tries to maximise profits and obsolescence of its devices, despite always claiming the opposite. All because they're unwilling to add a couple of dollars to their bill of materials.
They should be ashamed.
The cost to go from 16GB to 32GB is inconsequential. (They upped the step-up from 32GB to 64GB with no increase in price.) In fact, the cost to them from 16GB to 64GB is probably inconsequential. It's certainly nothing near the $100 in price.
The reason they keep it at 16GB is to make more people upgrade to 64GB. If the base model was 32GB, far fewer people would upgrade to 64GB, precisely because you would no longer have an unacceptably bad user experience.
It's not about hate, it's that Apple is a for-profit company whose goal is to maximize their profit. They've decided that many of those poorer users will choose to sacrifice something else in their life and give the difference to Apple.
Wouldn't it be a better strategy to do the right thing for the customers
Are you suggesting that an approach that better met the needs of their less well-off users would have increased their profitability? No, almost definitely not. I don't like Apple, but their current strategy definitely works for them.
Measured by the metric of profit, Apple is inarguably one of the most successful companies in the history of the world. If so, can you point to any companies who gotten better results from the "put customers first" strategy than Apple has has with theirs?
Most likely what you mean is that the world as a whole would be a better place if Apple pursued some other strategy than profit-maximization. I'd personally agree with this, but it's also difficult to come up with solid examples.
My iPod had 80GB of space. My nikon has a 128GB card in it. These are roles the iPhone is supposed to play, but it's an imitation at best because the storage is so hindered.
That and battery life are the two biggest pains I have with my iPhone, but apple seems to think everything is great as-is in those departments.
And it is not only the iPhone hit by this. I have a 64g iPad, the biggest configuration they offered at that time. For years now, its usage has been limited by the storage filling up. For this reason alone, I will not be buying this release of the iPad pro. A machine which is supposed to partially replace a laptop needs 256g at minimum, possibly 512g. Even if such configurations were more expensive than the currently offered ones, they would still be more interesting as those which just have no way of getting the desired storage sizes.
Isn't there another obvious spin on the data? It seems obvious that at least 70% of users with 16GB phones are doing fine with that amount of storage. Wouldn't it be a poor decision—certainly from a business point of view—to mandate larger storage for them, when they clearly aren't even using 16GB?
The premium Apple charges for larger disk space is ridiculously uncorrelated with the cost of the components but the solution to this is better competition.
There is a lot of competition out there. A lot of great competition. The problem with this argument is that Apple specifically makes it hard for its customers to switch ecosystems. So it's still Apple causing the issue.
The only reason I am myself willing to pay the apple premium is because I am extremely uncomfortable with google's invasion of android users privacy and google makes it hard to switch these features off (like "if you don't want google to upload your GPS locations then turn off the GPS!", etc).
..oh wait
The title of the post is similar to saying e.g. "ARM CPU is bad UX", and complain that you can't mine Bitcoin effectively on ARM.
If Apple were producing just the 16GB model, then usage numbers would probably be in order. As of now, things are just at their optimal state, where everyone can get what they want.