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Comment by mikecane | Hacker News Reader

128GBs is still not enough. That should be the base storage for a Retina iPad. How can they even sell a 16GB one with a straight face?

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Because plenty of people just use the iPad for e-mail and surfing the web so they don't need more than 16GB.

I have a 16GB iPad 1 still going strong - I barely use any apps outside of the ones preloaded [exceptions being Twitter, Facebook + Kindle].

When I travel, I load on a few movies / tv eps and I watch those. When I travel again, I just swap them out. I do the same at home. 16GB is ample if you're happy to swap content on & off your device.

16GB iPad user here. With most content streaming, I have never found the need for more storage.

16GB is enough for my books and enough movies (compressed appropriately) to keep me entertained on a transcontinental flight.

I have a large music collection, but that typically lives on my phone, not my ipad.

Because they've found that 16GB is adequate for many peoples' usage? Heck, I don't feel too constrained with 8GB on my Nexus 7 for the way I use it.

My father in law as a 16 GB iPad 2, bought shortly after it was released. Last time I checked he had 8-9 GB of free storage left on it despite having everything he could possibly want in the way of apps and pictures on it.

Eventually long-time users need to be selective for what they sync. Between music, videos and games I've always had to choose what I don't want, even on my laptop these days thanks to HD movies and retina apps.

What are you putting on a tablet that fills up 128GB of space?

Well, I stand corrected and am again pushed into the marginal category. That's OK. But it seems to me that if you're going to push HD video, you need the storage capacity to match it. And my overall point is that if the iPad is intended to be the next computing revolution, it needs to offer the storage capacity to get a lot of things done. Could any of you plop your entire photo, music, video, and eBook collections into an iPad and still have space leftover even with 128GBs? I couldn't. How many of you would want to pare down a 1TB hard drive down to 128GBs because, for some odd reason, that was now the maximum storage capacity any device offered? Maybe I'm still not making myself clear, but I think we should be far beyond 128GBs of storage by now.

I guess I'm also kinda marginal too. I don't expect my main device, be it a desktop, laptop or tablet, to be where I store everything. It's way too subject to data loss. I can steam (from personal sources or services) most of the time, and if I need access while radio quiet, 8GB is more than enough to cache a few interesting things locally.

I guess I'm too old school. I want my stuff with me, on my device. And I worry about public WiFi and the threat of my stuff being hacked if I'm accessing it that way -- and not having WiFi to access it too.

What do you use to sync your 100GB+ of stuff across your devices?

Sync? What sync? Even though I have a lot of stuff, I'm not dealing with all of it at one time. I can keep track of what's being done because it's just a handful. But it's the access to all of it that I need because who knows when I'll need what?

I'm still on a 16GB iPad 1.

Of the machines I own, internal storage is just cache. I have a 9TB zfs NAS for stuff I actually care about. Whether an iPad has 16GB or 128GB of storage doesn't really matter; they are both equally inadequate. There would need to be two orders of magnitude increase to fit all my stuff in.

If you put your photos or music on an iPad, you will chew up a lot of space. Even more if you put a movie or two on it (for off-line viewing).

My iTunes folder is currently at 60+ GB, and that's after purging all the TV shows off of it.

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