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rjcchan

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 23, 2015
70
9
Got my new 64GB SE today. It says the device capacity is 55GB. Can the system really take so much space?
 
It's not only the system, it's also the memory formatting that took about 5gb, just like with any flash drive or storage drive, you never get the full capacity.
 
I was expecting about 4-5GB not 9GB for system etc. If the system size is the same on the 16GB then I am really really happy about opting for the 64.
 
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It's not only the system, it's also the memory formatting that took about 5gb, just like with any flash drive or storage drive, you never get the full capacity.
It's not really accurate to call the 5GB loss as a result of "formatting". It's really a 5GB loss due to marketing. And they all do it, not just Apple.

The conversion from real GB to marketing GB is 93%
 
It's not really accurate to call the 5GB loss as a result of "formatting". It's really a 5GB loss due to marketing. And they all do it, not just Apple.

The conversion from real GB to marketing GB is 93%
It's the same way when ISPs market speeds. They advertise it as Mbps instead of MBPS. Why? Because it seems faster.

Screen Shot 2016-04-20 at 11.27.42 AM.png

A 465 GiB drive doesn't sound as appealing as a 500GB drive so they advertise it as a 500GB drive so it looks like you are getting more space. It's just marketing.
 
Yup, a good amount of it all has to do with GiB vs GB, so there's never actually as much actual space as what's advertised to begin with.
 
I was expecting about 4-5GB not 9GB for system etc. If the system size is the same on the 16GB then I am really really happy about opting for the 64.

You're still not getting it.
9GB is not taken up by the "system".
Same reason when you buy a 1TB hard drive but it shows 931GB available.
Read this below and educate yourself about the topic.

http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm


"This space is not “lost”. Drive manufacturers report drive sizes using base 10 math while computer operating systems tend to report these sizes using base 2 math. The advantage of using base 2 math means that the code is somewhat simpler and it will run faster. The DIV instruction to carry out the base 10 math will end up executing at least 4 times longer than doing SHR instructions for the base 2 math (minimum of 41 cycles as opposed to a maximum of 10). If there are cache misses, NAN errors, etc., the number of clock cycles for the DIV instruction can result in 100 cycles or more being added to the time required to perform the operation. This does not take into account the possibility that more registers may need to be preserved (stored elsewhere) for the DIV instruction than the SHR instruction and recovered afterwards increasing the execution time even more. Because of all of this, instead of dividing by factors of 1000 (or shifting 3 decimal positions) we are shifting 10 binary positions effectively dividing by factors of 1024. The end result is that a hard drive labeled by the manufacturer as being 1TB will be reported by most operating systems as 931GiB."
 
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I was expecting about 4-5GB not 9GB for system etc. If the system size is the same on the 16GB then I am really really happy about opting for the 64.
Apple lists GB for storage but the OS measures in GiB.

Your SE has 64,000,000,000 bytes, which is 64GB or 59.6GiB.
 
Apple lists GB for storage but the OS measures in GiB.

Your SE has 64,000,000,000 bytes, which is 64GB or 59.6GiB.
Not just Apple, as has been pointed out before, it's been throughout the whole industry for a long time, even before smartphones and all that.
 
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Not just Apple, as has been pointed out before, it's been throughout the whole industry for a long time, even before smartphones and all that.
Well OP was specifically talking about the iPhone, which is why I only mentioned Apple.
 
Well OP was specifically talking about the iPhone, which is why I only mentioned Apple.
Which can make it sound like Apple is doing soemething untoward and/or are the only ones doing it like that for some reason, rather than it all simply being an established and accepted way of going about it all by pretty much everyone in the industry, which is what my comment expanded on essentially.
 
Which can make it sound like Apple is doing soemething untoward and/or are the only ones doing it like that for some reason, rather than it all simply being an established and accepted way of going about it all by pretty much everyone in the industry, which is what my comment expanded on essentially.
I wasn't trying to make it seem like Apple is trying to deceive people or that they're doing something no one else is. I simply stated that Apple lists the storage in GB, while the OS measures in GiB.

The OS is what displays your storage incorrectly. Your 64GB iPhone has 64GB of storage. When you see 55.7GB of available storage, that's actually 55.7GiB, or ~59.8GB, with the OS taking up the remaining ~4.2GB.
 
I wasn't trying to make it seem like Apple is trying to deceive people or that they're doing something no one else is. I simply stated that Apple lists the storage in GB, while the OS measures in GiB.

The OS is what displays your storage incorrectly. Your 64GB iPhone has 64GB of storage. When you see 55.7GB of available storage, that's actually 55.7GiB, or ~59.8GB, with the OS taking up the remaining ~4.2GB.
I didn't really mean it in the sense that's that's what you were trying to say, just that it could be read that way given how it was phrased.
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16,000,000,000 / (1024*1024*1024) = 14.9GB

14.9GB - 5.58 = 10.32GB free
Don't think it all takes up 5.58. From what I recall most people reposted having something in the 11.xx GB range free (closer to 12 GB basically).
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Continuing to sell the 16 gb at this point is just criminal
For plenty typical users even 10 GB is probably twice as much as they would generally use up. (Not that I think that the base shouldn't be more.)
 
I didn't really mean it in the sense that's that's what you were trying to say, just that it could be read that way given how it was phrased.
[doublepost=1461274529][/doublepost]
Don't think it all takes up 5.58. From what I recall most people reposted having something in the 11.xx GB range free (closer to 12 GB basically).
[doublepost=1461274580][/doublepost]
For plenty typical users even 10 GB is probably twice as much as they would generally use up. (Not that I think that the base shouldn't be more.)

I don't know. Emails, photos and messages will eat up space, thats before even considering music and/or apps. My messages alone are like 3 gb (although they go all the way back to 2009).
 
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