I have a 128GB iPhone and I ran out of space.

How? What kind of data is filling that? Are you backing any of that data up to somewhere?

My top ten biggest users of space on my iPhone at the moment:

Music 47GB
Photos 13GB
Videos (a few TV episodes I have queued up to watch, I'm away abroad on holiday at the moment) 7GB
TomTom 2GB
Overcast (podcasts) 2GB
Messages 2GB
Google Maps (with a few offline areas) 1GB
ViewRanger (walking maps) 1GB
iMovie 1GB
Galileo (offline Open Street Map) 1GB

I currently have ~20GB free, but that is only because I've done what I really didn't want to have to do and turned on "optimise space" in iCloud Photo Library. I have 45GB of photos/videos in iCloud and I'd really rather have high quality* versions of them all on my phone

I don't use Apple Music, I tried using it to sync my music library and it was awful. Some things failed to sync completely, some things were replaced with live versions of studio songs, some things were replaced with unrelated tracks, etc. But to be honest even if it worked, I wouldn't really want to use it, I want to have all the music available without worrying about whether what I want to listen to isn't on the phone when I have a crappy Internet connection.

All the real data on the phone is backed up in multiple ways.

Hopefully I'll have an iPhone some day with 256GB of storage and I can turn "optimise space" back off in iCloud Photo Library

* I think I've said it here before, but I wish iCloud Photo Library was more clever about how it used space with "optimise space" turned on. I'd like it to use some of my 20GB of spare space to cache some larger image previews, I'd fed up with saying "let me just show you photo of X" to find that I only have the thumbnail image of the photo and I wait the next few minutes for a viewable image to be available

I should also say that I have even more content that I'd like to be on the phone. I have ~60GB of photos from my DSLR that I'd really love to merge into my iCloud Photo Library at some point and have available on my phone. I daren't do that at the moment.

And I do pity Apple trying to meet the expectations of both people who truly don't need more than 16GB (I know a few people like this) and me, who'd happily try to fill a 512GB phone

There are some situations where online syncing services are still a crappy solution.

I'm away on holiday abroad this week, with limited roaming bandwidth and a very slow broadband connection. I'm taking photos on my waterproof camera and adding them to iCloud Photo Library via my Macbook.

I'd love to show some photos around the dinner table on my iPhone or iPad to the family members I'm away with. But I can't because Photos on the Mac is still busy uploading them to the cloud and may well not finish until I get back home to a real Internet connection.

This is a key reason my next iPad will likely be the maxed out storage version. It tends to be my device that I show photos on the most, especially with family in areas with poor internet coverage. (As in they have cellular where I end up roaming with a whopping 50MB of data before being cut off.)


Someone got to the bottom of the odd matching issues. iTunes Match has a great system that worked in almost all cases, this was the old $25 a year service that is still burred in there somewhere. Apple Music had it's own matching system, and it's where the mismatches started coming in. If someone had iTunes Match still active, it ended up disabling the Apple Music matching and continued working well. Apple at some point retired the Apple Music matching system, and swapped in the iTunes Match one for all Apple Music users. I'm guessing the one in Apple Music initially was from the Beats side.

I also used iTunes Match at one point before Apple Music existed, it also screwed up my music collection in interesting ways.

But even if the syncing was perfect, that isn't how I want my music collection to operate.

I hate the syncing system with a passion.

I just got a 256G iPad Pro and have been juggling with storage issues. Mine is mostly movies and television shows followed by music and photos, though.

Fascinating look at where 200MB of the phone storage is going: https://backchannel.com/an-exclusive-look-at-how-ai-and-machine-learning-work-at-apple-8dbfb131932b

Very interesting. This all definitely shows the different use cases of people and their mobile devices. I really don't have any interest in keeping everything on my phone. Even if I did, I've gone so fully into streaming music that I don't even feel like downloading everything to my phone. I'd rather just stream it, and I'm almost never out of cell or WiFi coverage.

Similarly for photos, any time I want to show someone some photos on my phone, I'm almost always on WiFi, and even if I'm not, my cellular plan is more than enough to bring up a dozen photos of my son to show someone who's interested. One of my absolute favorite things about the Google Photos app is how it completely blurs the distinction between photos on the phone and photos on the cloud. I never even know where it ends and I don't care. I regularly just go in and tell it to wipe all the photos on my phone that have already backed up, and it does it for me, but functionally everything still looks the same.

Between those two things, and the fact that I never watch video on my phone, I honestly don't need more than a 32GB phone. But you guys use your phones differently so I can see how you need way more space. I don't think, however, that any of these companies should have been releasing 16GB phones as of about 2 years ago. That's when they should have moved to 32GB as the baseline. There never should have been a 16GB phone capable of 4K video. That's just anti-consumer.

I certainly can't wait for the iPhone 7 to come out, because then I'll have a lot less work to do

I've heard the 4K talking point several times, and it's worth pointing out no iPhone defaults to recording video in 4K. The default is 1080p at 30fps, resulting in about ~130MB per minute. 4K is ~350MB per minute.

I do mostly agree on the baseline moving to 32GB is likely overdue. At least in two weeks that will likely happen on the high end devices and the talking point can be put to rest.

Any bets on what the next iPhone "gate" issue will be?

Lol, I think the headphone jack is already that.

FYI, it looks like the "rent a movie" trick might not work in iOS 10. My wife tried it tonight and it successfully rented the movie. Anyone know how to get a refund on those? We didn't watch it yet...