How many gb?

[heycal]

How many GB do the new operating systems/iphone 6 use up? How many are left over for apps, music, photos, etc in a 16 GB phone?

I have an iphone 4. Under storage it says I've used 6.2 GB, and there are 0 bytes available. I have 400 songs on the phone, a couple of hundred photos, maybe 30 or 40 apps, no games or videos or anything too fancy.

I'm trying to figure how many GB I would truly need in an iphone 6.

 

[cmichaelb]

How many GB do the new operating systems/iphone 6 use up? How many are left over for apps, music, photos, etc in a 16 GB phone?

I have an iphone 4. Under storage it says I've used 6.2 GB, and there are 0 bytes available. I have 400 songs on the phone, a couple of hundred photos, maybe 30 or 40 apps, no games or videos or anything too fancy.

I'm trying to figure how many GB I would truly need in an iphone 6.

What do you have, an 8 GB iPhone 4?

 

[deeddawg]

I've seen people report about 12GB available on the 16GB phones after accounting for base-10 GB vs base-2 GiB differences and then the space used by iOS and stock apps.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

 

[heycal]

What do you have, an 8 GB iPhone 4?

Yes, I believe so. It lists my capacity at 6.2 GB, so maybe that means what I had free to use with 1.8GB being used for the operating system?

I've seen people report about 12GB available on the 16GB phones after accounting for base-10 GB vs base-2 GiB differences and then the space used by iOS and stock apps.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

So would this mean that the the phone/operating system uses up about 4GB before you put anything on it?

If there would be 12 GB left over on an iphone 6 16GB, and I don't really feel the need for more than a few extra GB over the 6.2 I have now, maybe the 16GB phone is fine for me, giving me double what I have now?

I don't want to be the idiot who spends extra for a 64 GB phone, and then never uses more than 10 GB of them over the next couple of years… But nor do I want to be the idiot who tries to save a hundred bucks and then finds his needs or desires change, and four months down the road he's got storage problems.

 

[deeddawg]

So would this mean that the the phone/operating system uses up about 4GB before you put anything on it?

Sort of. Part of it is just different "accounting" methods where the box label considers 1GB to be 1,000,000,000 bytes of storage, but the phone OS considers 1GB to be 1,073,741,824 bytes (referred to as GiB). So the advertised 16GB is actually 14.9GiB with nothing else there. Then knock off a couple GB/GiB for OS and apps to end up close to 12GiB available on a fresh phone.

Difficult for anyone else to tell you what you need; just remember that photos and videos consume space, as do big games. If you like graphics intensive games and tend to keep a bunch on the phone you'd need a lot more storage than if you maybe keep one or two little casual games around.

Personally I've always been comfortable in 32GB and never used all of 64GB even when available. Still, I knew 16 wasn't enough so chose the 64Gb model.

Resale-wise it's usually been that the premium you pay for more storage does NOT come back later. In reverse though you'd lose a lot more buying a 16 only to later need a 64 than to buy a 64 and not use the extra storage. (assuming you don't want to mess with buying a used 64 if the 16 wasn't right)

 

[Chocolatemilty]

Yes, I believe so. It lists my capacity at 6.2 GB, so maybe that means what I had free to use with 1.8GB being used for the operating system?



So would this mean that the the phone/operating system uses up about 4GB before you put anything on it?

If there would be 12 GB left over on an iphone 6 16GB, and I don't really feel the need for more than a few extra GB over the 6.2 I have now, maybe the 16GB phone is fine for me, giving me double what I have now?

I don't want to be the idiot who spends extra for a 64 GB phone, and then never uses more than 10 GB of them over the next couple of years… But nor do I want to be the idiot who tries to save a hundred bucks and then finds his needs or desires change, and four months down the road he's got storage problems.

Checked on this too as I've done my phone research, OP. I believe to my knowledge the 6 had 12.7 GBs left and the 6 Plus 12.4 GBs left after the OS, but I could be off with those numbers. I'm currently the same as you, and I've had a 16GB iPhone for 3 years and haven't ran into storage problems yet. You may be ok with the 16GB as well, it sounds like.

 

[cmichaelb]

Yes, I believe so. It lists my capacity at 6.2 GB, so maybe that means what I had free to use with 1.8GB being used for the operating system?

So would this mean that the the phone/operating system uses up about 4GB before you put anything on it?

If there would be 12 GB left over on an iphone 6 16GB, and I don't really feel the need for more than a few extra GB over the 6.2 I have now, maybe the 16GB phone is fine for me, giving me double what I have now?

I don't want to be the idiot who spends extra for a 64 GB phone, and then never uses more than 10 GB of them over the next couple of years… But nor do I want to be the idiot who tries to save a hundred bucks and then finds his needs or desires change, and four months down the road he's got storage problems.

Checked on this too as I've done my phone research, OP. I believe to my knowledge the 6 had 12.7 GBs left and the 6 Plus 12.4 GBs left after the OS, but I could be off with those numbers. I'm currently the same as you, and I've had a 16GB iPhone for 3 years and haven't ran into storage problems yet. You may be ok with the 16GB as well, it sounds like.

OP - That's what I was thinking as well. I prefer to error on the side of too much storage but we all have different needs and use patterns. For me personally, 64gb is the minimum I purchase but I use it heavily for a lot of different things. I think higher storage would help with resell value down the line if you chose to do that.

If 8 GB has worked this well, then 64GB is overkill.

 

[heycal]

If 8 GB has worked this well, then 64GB is overkill.

8 GB is frankly not enough. I need a few more, as I've had times where I couldn't take a photo because I was out of storage and I had to go delete stuff.

But I'm not sure I need 56GB more storage. I play no games, don't watch videos, don't take thousands of pictures. I have about 40 apps and 400 songs on this phone. The songs take up 2.9GB. The next highest things are messages at 331MB, photos 186MB.

The main appeal of the 64GB would be to put all 4000 of my itune library songs on the phone, and in case possible future needs or desires arise. (Don't care about resale value). But neither of those reasons are extremely important to me.

If they had a 32GB phone, I would probably want that one. Which is what they probably figured!