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16GB iPad owners - is it enough?

JD92

JD92

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 14, 2005
934
31
I've been struggling over the last few days over whether to buy a 16GB or 32GB iPad 2. I've done a bit of Googling and all I keep seeing is people saying the same old "if you don't put a lot of music or video on it then it'll be fine". That's fair enough, but I knew that before I did the search, and I can't say for sure exactly what I'll do with my iPad once I get it.

So, my question to owners of 16GB iPads is: Is it enough? Do you wish you'd bought a bigger one? What do you use your iPad for?
 
I use my iPad 2 for browsing the web mainly as I have a 16gb model and its plenty. I feel the 16gb model is much to small for having many games and having music/video.
On the other hand, I have a 64gb iPad 1 that has a lot of games/music/movies, so I do not wish I had a bigger hard drive in my second gen.
If you think you're going to use your iPad for games and as a media player get the 32gb, otherwise 16
 
It's well enough for me. I use it for browsing, games, books and drawing. Music and vid are on other devices - iphone, mbp, ps3 etc. I think i'm only using about 6gb or so. Depends what you want it for I guess. My iphone is 32gb and always stuffed to the gills with music - would prefer 64 on that if I'm honest. It's so portable that's where everything is. MBP for vid when away from home and ps3/HD TV over network at home. Ipad fills a niche that's not really needed, but it's brill for what I use it for!

On reflection, if I was on planes all the time or something, I would be sticking vid on it and would require a 32/64.
 
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Jacksteruk309 said:
I've been struggling over the last few days over whether to buy a 16GB or 32GB iPad 2. I've done a bit of Googling and all I keep seeing is people saying the same old "if you don't put a lot of music or video on it then it'll be fine". That's fair enough, but I knew that before I did the search, and I can't say for sure exactly what I'll do with my iPad once I get it.

So, my question to owners of 16GB iPads is: Is it enough? Do you wish you'd bought a bigger one? What do you use your iPad for?
Click to expand...

I had planned on a 32GB wi-fi as I already had Mi-fi from Verizon. A friend of mine ... heavy in to photography mentioned he had about 45 GB of stuff on his (obviously a 64 GB) ... 13 movies at about 2 GB each.

When we were at the counter to finalize our choice ... my bride said I could get an extra 32GB for only $100 extra. So that is what we did. (64GB was our choice) The key reason is cloud computing is going to be slow and expensive. So I wanted local storage. Just made sense. Now it's your choice.
 
If you aren't opposed to the idea of deleting apps after you're done with them or want to spend the time micromanaging your apps and multimedia files, 16gb should be ok.

With that said, I ran out of space on my 32GB iPhone 4 more than once, and I carry about 3GB of music on it.

I got a 64GB iPad 2 because you can never have too much space, but it depends on what you plan on doing.
 
Seriously dude, how are we supposed to know?

How much video do you have? How much music do you have? Do you want them all on your iPad or are you willing to switch around? Do you have another device for music? Are you going to spend long periods of time without your computer? Do you want to do a lot of gaming on the iPad? Do you want to have your media on your device or are you planning on using things like Netflix/Hulu/Air Video/others for streaming? Do you travel a lot? What do you want to use your iPad for?

Also, these might help:

Is 16GB enough?

Storage discussion (16GB, 32GB, 64GB)

16GB or 32 GB??

is 16GB iPad enough?

16gb, 32gb or 64gb?

Attn: 16gb wifi owners - any regrets?

Should I get a 16gb or 32gb?

Is 16gb enough for you?
 
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I think it's safe to say you'll find yourself doing things on your iPad that you wouldn't do on your iPhone/iPod because of the larger screen like watching a movie/reading a book. Although books don't take up a lot of room, movies do. I'd say if your iTunes library is over 6-7gb, get yourself a 32gb ipad because 6-7gigs of music on a 16gb ipad leaves only ~7gb for apps/extra movies/music
 
I have a 16gb iPhone 4.
I hardly store any music or videos on it but have found I have only got about 2gb free!!

I have about 10gb worth of apps and a fair bit of photos.

I went for the 32gb iPad 2 because even though I won't be uploading much music or photos onto it, I'll be using a lot of apps and will probably add the movie or so.

I say go for the 32gb if you can afford it.
 
Movies can easily take up 2GB each, typical apps take up ~20MB, but some (like games) can take up several hundred Megabytes.

I do a lot of media streaming, and use cloud services (maily DropBox) for documents because I have fast Internet at home, at school, at work, and unlimited data on my phone which has wifi hotspot. And I don't have a lot of apps. So I'm only using like 6 or 7GB.

I got the 32GB model, because they didn't have any 16s.
 
I've gone back n forth on this as well and I looked at it from my fathers frugal ways

ipad 2 wi fi only 16gb = $499
ipad 2 wi fi only 32gb = $599

haha if you bought two 16gb @ $499 = $998

go with the 32gb;)
 
When I purchased the iPad 1 I went for 32GB and very rarely got close to 16GB....even when putting on a few movies for flights!

So this time I went for 16Gb and almost immediately filled it with The Big Bang Theory leaving me with only 1.5GB left! I wanted all seasons on there because now I've watched them all I just watch random episodes.

But as others have said, depends on your individual preference! Why don't you buy a 32GB and if it's more than enough swap it for a 16, if not upgrade to 64!
 
If you have another computer which can do air video server and streamtome server, 16gig should be way more than enough.. Stream is the name of the game.
 
jvmxtra said:
If you have another computer which can do air video server and streamtome server, 16gig should be way more than enough.. Stream is the name of the game.
Click to expand...

+1 I do the same thing. I don't put any music or videos on my iPad, I just stream. I also use a 16GB iPhone 4 and still have 8.4GB left after I put my most listened to bands on it. I have 50 apps on my iPad 2 and still have 11.4GB left.

I was torn between the 32 and 16 model but when only 16 was in stock I just thought that was a sign to take it :D
 
If you have an iphone and have a lot of music on that 16gb seems fine. I wanted the 16 but found a 32 so I got that.

If it wasn't so scarce I'd definitely be ok with 16gb
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

I had a 32 first gen ipad. Was a joy being able to just throw a bunch of videos and songs on there and not worry one iota about capacity. Then something funny happened. I realized I never watched/listened to that stuff. All my songs are on my iPhone and I almost never watch videos more than once or twice.

So this time around with the ipad 2, I went with the "budget" model. Still have 7gb left after syncing all my apps, photos and cloud files. Over the weekend, I rented two movies for a short weekend trip and still had roughly 4gb.

Also, I've already resigned to the fact that I'm upgrading every year. So if 16 doesn't turn out to be enough, it'll be 32 for the ipad 3.
 
I think 16gb is enough if your not putting any music on it and only a couple movies like 2-4 movies.
 
Plenty here. Still have a dec amount of space on my iPhone 4 so couldn't justify the extra $$$ to get more than 16gb, but I don't keep many media files on them.
 
threads about 16GB - are there enough?

just kidding, but seriously.

it all boils down to what you do with the iPad.

plenty for me, i stream a lot of my media.
 
Always better to have too much than too little. So since you're undecided, go for the 32g and it won't be a waste. You won't get frustrated to keep transferring files, if it gets to that level. If you never use it, you never use it. No big deal. But the minute you go small and need more, you'll become irritated and frustrated at yourself, most likely, for not playing it safe.

I was in line and when the guy got to me, I told him32G Blk and he said sorry, all we have is 16 or 64. 64 without hesitation knowing there's a possibility I may never store that much.

Grow into it; don't outgrow it.
 
I strongly believe that keeping my files (of all types) backed up, is quite important. Therefore I simply load my iPad & iPhone with whatever I feel like. It saves a lot of money since Apple charges so much per GB for larger capacity devices.

Besides it not a very good idea to keep everything on your device anyway.

Then there's the issue of upgrading. If you like to get a new one every year or two, you're losing money no matter what people say about high resale value.

Do yourself a favor and buy the 16GB model.
 
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