Heavyweight iPad apps- how big are they going to be?

[zub3qin]

Does anyone know exactly how much memory iPad apps (the big ones) like Keynote/Pages/Numbers will take up?

16 GB seems more than sufficient for my needs, but not if apps are going to take some massive amount. I checked and Keynote and Pages on my Macbook takes only 250-280MB, so my hunch is that apps aren't going to be any larger than that on iPad.....no?

 

[guycross]

There isn't any reason for them to be any larger than on a regular mac. I haven't check though, is that the full install size?

 

[r0k]

I got a serious wake up call the other day. I copied my installed apps to my Macbook from my iPod touch and I have close to a gig of stuff. Wow. Some apps are over 100 meg and some are 25 meg. I would expect iWork to be in the hundreds of megabytes. For this reason, I'm probably going to go for a larger iPad than I initially wanted. I reserved the 16 gig model but I'm going to go to either the 32 or the 64 gig model. My 'touch might never fill up but I could see filling up the iPad very quickly and that doesn't include photos movies and music.

Edit: I should mention that I downloaded some large apps. They take a very long time to download over wifi. Examples are Louvre, Great Books, 3d Brain, Olivetree Bible reader (with several purchased bibles) and Tree Id. Most of the free apps are only a few meg but the pay apps can range from a few meg to over a hundred meg. On a Mac, if you look in your ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications folder you get an idea how big these apps are.

 

[nippyjun]

I think that most non-game apps won't be large, but games could be. Some are already 200 megs and up.

 

[blackNBUK]

Interesting question; my off-the-cuff response would be that non-game Apps would still be pretty small. However I thought I'd get some more data and I was a bit surprised. I have Pages '06 on my Mac and it weighs in at about 850Mbs. That sounds pretty large, however the vast majority of this is in the supplied templates which I would estimate at 700-750Mbs. A lot of this is wasted space too as template images appear to be duplicated for each of the different supported languages.

So it looks like Apple have a lot of scope to slim Pages down should they want to. I would guess that 200Mbs installed wouldn't be unreasonable.

 

[bossxii]

Basing it off the iPhone apps such as Madden football or TW golf, which come in around 100 to 140mb's I'd guess the larger games, full 3D, more commercialized titles may double in size? Either way I don't think it will be an issue. The great thing about the iPhone/iPad is everything is custom built for these devices. No "fluff" to account for various combo's of CPU/GPU/Screen res etc... They can reduce many of the library files or whatever they are called that have to account for all the variations they need to on a traditional computer.

I still think 16gig is a joke as a media device when even iPhone size movies are 700mb to 1.5gigs. I opt'd for the 32gig for now, but it may end up going to the wife if I decide to pick up a 2nd one in 64gig.

 

[Plucker]

Watch out for some large iPAD apps. The one that surprised me (and which I got a refund for after asking nicely) was "Elements", a multimedia periodic table of elelments that weighed in at 1.7 GBytes!

 

[Ashwood11]

I still think 16gig is a joke as a media device when even iPhone size movies are 700mb to 1.5gigs. I opt'd for the 32gig for now, but it may end up going to the wife if I decide to pick up a 2nd one in 64gig.

I purchased the 32 Gb model in April 2010 and still have 23.4 Gb free. I have everything I want on my iPad and store even more in the iTunes library on my laptop. Having a 16 Gb model is not a joke. Purchase what you need, not what someone tells you you need.

 

[Plucker]

I purchased the 32 Gb model in April 2010 and still have 23.4 Gb free. I have everything I want on my iPad and store even more in the iTunes library on my laptop. Having a 16 Gb model is not a joke. Purchase what you need, not what someone tells you you need.

I have to agree, for me 16 Gb is plenty, but for those that want to carry around shedloads of music, photos and video then I can see that 16 Gb could be a limitation. And I was shocked at the prices of the 32 and 64 Gb versions. Apple are charging £80 for 16Gb of memory effectively!

 

[cmvsm]

I have to agree, for me 16 Gb is plenty, but for those that want to carry around shedloads of music, photos and video then I can see that 16 Gb could be a limitation. And I was shocked at the prices of the 32 and 64 Gb versions. Apple are charging £80 for 16Gb of memory effectively!

With the 16GB, you actually only have 13.5GB of storage. With some newer apps that take advantage of the new hardware weighing in at 600-700MB, you'll eat up that 13.5GB pretty quickly.

I would assume that the next gen of iPad 3 devices will also start at 32GB as a base model, so your resale value may be a bit on the low side as the 16GB slides out of the line up.

 

[archdelux]

keep in mind that some apps--the heavy hitters that let you store and edit files (ie iannotate, quickoffice, etc) can become huge based not on the app itself but on the files you store within the app..

I hae 6.2Gbs of apps apparently..dont know how that happened.. but It's ok..64GB ipad

 

[Rigby]

Does anyone know exactly how much memory iPad apps (the big ones) like Keynote/Pages/Numbers will take up?

Productivity apps do not use much space. For example, the Quickoffice ipa file is just 22 MB. By far the biggest app I have is Navigon, which weighs in at about 2GB due to the map material. The next largest is Dark Nebula 2 (a game) at about 92 MB.

16 GB seems more than sufficient for my needs, but not if apps are going to take some massive amount.

Generally, apps do not use much memory. Storage capacity is primarily important if you want to put videos or lots of photos and documents on the device.

 

[ripkord]

Is it fair to say the >500mb apps are the exception?

 

[mkrishnan]

Is it fair to say the >500mb apps are the exception?

So far, even among games, sizes that large are mostly the exception (and mostly they're navigation apps or apps that store tons of data, like Wikipedia offline apps). That might change as more sophisticated games (e.g. that were developed for DVD-ROM distribution) make their way to iOS.

 

[BJMRamage]

I have a 16gb iPad 2 and it is all but 2-3 GB full.
I have some newsstand magazines which are heavy and have archived most, maybe all but one so far.

Also, Flipboard and 500px seem to take 500-1000mb.
a couple kids apps are very large too.

i was quite surprised Apple didn't bump the base to 32gb...but seeing as iPad2 just added camera and iPad 3 just added retina i guess they wait until iPad 4 to bump the size.

 

[rhett7660]

So far the largest one I have weights in over a gig, RageHD. I can see this one going even bigger if they make it available for the the new iPad. Most of my apps if not all are only in the 10-50meg range. There are a few exceptions.

One thing I can say, is I was storing a lot of reading content, i.e. Zunio mags and comics books.

I am going from 32 gig to 16 gig. Going to have to be selective on what I store on my iPad now.

Did anybody else catch the sizes of the new Apple iPad apps? They almost doubled in size.